Ep. 89 // "In A Distant Place" w/ Rabbi Lazer Gurkow

00:00 Speaker 1 Everything around me tells me that Mashiach is not even a distant dream on the horizon. Life has become so drastically different from the way it was when I lived in the Rebbe's chassidim, and the interests of the people around me are so grub compared to the way they were before, and I begin to doubt is Mashiach coming.

00:24 Speaker 2 Mm.

00:24 Speaker 1 And within this space, because it's thirty-two years, I have to say for myself, this is the tachnun shebitachnun that needs to be turned into a dira. This is the test of malchus.

00:39 Speaker 2 Welcome to Homesick for Lubavitch, a podcast where we explore Lubavitch identity in the year two thousand and twenty-six. My name is Benjie Afson, and I will be your host. Let's begin. All righty. We are here in the new Yuval Media Studio in Bala Cynwyd with Rabbi Lazar Gurkow, who hails from Toronto, Ontario.

01:07 Speaker 1 London.

01:08 Speaker 2 London. London, Ontario, near Toronto, or between Toronto and-

01:12 Speaker 1 Detroit

01:12 Speaker 2 ... and Detroit. Okay. So, um, actually how, how many years?

01:18 Speaker 1 Originally since ninety-six, but in London since two thousand.

01:22 Speaker 2 Okay. So, uh, you were here for Shabbos, for a Shabbaton in Bala Cynwyd, and, uh, we figured that, um, given that I don't know when the next time I'll be in London, Ontario is, we'll hop around here, and we have you here, and we're here-- we're happy to host you here in the studio. Before we begin, let me ask all those who like the podcast to like and subscribe on the various platforms, and for those who really like the podcast, to support the podcast at hflpodcast.com/donate. Rabbi Lazar-

01:52 Speaker 1 Thank you.

01:54 Speaker 2 Thank you again. Let's begin from the beginning of your story, which I understand starts in Boston.

02:01 Speaker 1 Yep. My parents were shluchim in Boston. They were both immigrants, both from Ukraine. Both came out after the war when all the Lubavitchers came out with the forged Polish passports. Uh, my father came to New York through London, England. My mother came-

02:18 Speaker 2 Your father was?

02:19 Speaker 1 Moisha Gurkow.

02:20 Speaker 2 Right. So we go back a little bit. His grand-- h-h-him and my grandfather were good friends, correct?

02:25 Speaker 1 Yes. He and your grandfather were good friends, first in London and then later in seven seventy. So, uh, he came to New York in Tushen Yudei. My mother also came around the same time. Actually, she came to Philadelphia first, and we're in Philadelphia now, and she only moved to New York, I don't know if it was six months or twelve months later.

02:43 Speaker 2 What was your mother's maiden name?

02:44 Speaker 1 My mother was actually also a Gurkow. Uh, they were first cousins. But funny enough, when my mother's, my mother's father was lost in the war, he was MIA, and until today, we don't know where he's buried. We know that fascinatingly enough, all the years, whenever the Rebbe was asked for a bracha that he would be found, the Rebbe would give a bracha. And then when my nephew was born, and off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you exactly what year that was, my brother asked if he can name his son after my mother's father, which his name is Yisroel, and the Rebbe gave his consent. So at that point, we sort of knew as a family that he had passed away.

03:26 Speaker 2 Oh, so your, your grandmother was an agunah.

03:29 Speaker 1 My grandmother was an agunah. As we went through my parents' papers after they moved into a nursing home, we discovered the actual documents that we had only heard about in the past, that she actually had a heter from Rav Herzog, who was the Rav HaRashi in Eretz Yisroel. He looked into her case, and he issued a heter for her to remarry, but she never wanted to remarry. What if my husband comes back? So she remained an agunah throughout her life.

03:55 Speaker 2 So she wasn't a Halakhic agunah. She was a de facto agunah.

03:59 Speaker 1 De facto, she remained an agunah. And the Rebbe gave many brachas that she would see him, but that never came to be. I remember as a child asking my mother how that's even possible. That was something I had to grapple with from a very young age, the emunah that the tzadik's bracha is absolutely going to be mekayem, and then it turns out that it's fulfilled in ways that you weren't expecting, but certainly not in the pragmatic, practical way you thought it would be.

04:23 Speaker 2 And what did she answer?

04:24 Speaker 1 She didn't have an answer. My mother really never did explain it. I had to grapple with that as I grew up.

04:29 Speaker 2 Wait, your mo-- you were asking your mother about your grandmother, right?

04:33 Speaker 1 I was asking my mother about my grandfather, why my grandfather was not found if the Rebbe gave so many brachas that he would be.

04:40 Speaker 2 Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

04:42 Speaker 1 So, um-

04:43 Speaker 2 So she, she didn't have an answer.

04:45 Speaker 1 She did not have an answer.

04:45 Speaker 2 But she wasn't the one, she wasn't the one changing her life as a result. Your grandmother was.

04:49 Speaker 1 Yeah. I never discussed it with my grandmother. I don't know exactly why. It's not like I would have had enough sensitivity to be thinking that this is an uncomfortable conversation with a grandmother. I was too young for that. Um-

05:02 Speaker 2 What kind of person was she? Was she like someone who was-- would, would you say she was like deeply depressed because she's waiting for her grandfa-- or she was somehow-

05:12 Speaker 1 So my grandmother developed Alzheimer's when I was nine. It was in Teshrin mem beis that we actually put her into Aish LaAvraham, a nursing home in Williamsburg. And actually, that was my first interaction with Satmar, and I found them to be so kind. It was hard to reconcile-

05:28 Speaker 2 This was in mem beis?

05:29 Speaker 1 In mem beis. It was hard to reconcile the stories we know about the tensions between Satmar and Lubavitch and seeing-

05:36 Speaker 2 Which was pretty hot back then.

05:37 Speaker 1 Yeah. And seeing these-

05:38 Speaker 2 In mem beis you were-

05:39 Speaker 1 ... high school girls coming out of school and coming to Aish LaAvraham and feeding my grandmother.

05:44 Speaker 2 Right.

05:45 Speaker 1 They might not have known that she was a Lubavitcher, but that didn't matter to them. So that was also a very interesting, uh, discovery for me when I was younger, and until today I have, I'm much more open to other kreizen than a lot of other Lubavitchers might be.

06:00 Speaker 2 Would they make any issue to you when you came to visit?

06:03 Speaker 1 Nothing. Aish HaTorah never treated us differently from anyone else. To them, we were just a Jewish family with a patient who needed help.

06:10 Speaker 2 Yeah. Look, it's interesting, the whole-- that whole narrative needs a You know, I, I don't... I'm not saying-- I'm not putting you on the spot. I'm not saying that you have to be the historian of it here. But, like, I was just, uh, interviewing, um, I was interviewing Rabbi Lustig in Crown Heights about f-for, for a video for, uh, Bikkur Cholim Crown Heights. And, uh, his mother was a president of Bikkur Cholim Crown Heights for a bunch of years.

06:37 Speaker 1 I did not know that.

06:38 Speaker 2 Yeah. I-

06:38 Speaker 1 He was my principal.

06:39 Speaker 2 Right. Right. Right. Um, oh, uh, you know, so his, his mother was a, actually a Holocaust survivor, a, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor. The reason she ended up as a president of Bikkur Cholim Crown Heights was because the mosad needed help growing, and they came to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe said that the Ungvarer ladies seem to know how to do these things best, so you should find the Ungvarer ladies that live in Crown Heights and, and kind of draft them into this project. And so Mrs. Lustig and I think two others ended up coming on board and growing the organization. Right. So, like, that whole, like, you know, Satmar's terrible, that narrative didn't exist back then. You know, so, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not trying to discount... Th-there were, there were some serious tensions and, and things got very hot and, and very, very, uh, very tense. But, you know, you, you wonder sometimes, like, you know, how, how... You know, and of course, you know, like, you speak-- Some people-- There, there was, there was some actual physical violence as well at certain points. A-and you don't wanna minimize that. You can't minimize that as much as you'd like to.

07:49 Speaker 1 I'm not gonna erase history.

07:51 Speaker 2 Right.

07:51 Speaker 1 The events that happened did in fact happen.

07:53 Speaker 2 Right.

07:54 Speaker 1 But at the same time, that's not the entire story.

07:56 Speaker 2 That's my point. That's my point.

07:58 Speaker 1 That's not the entire story.

07:58 Speaker 2 No.

07:59 Speaker 1 S-a little while ago, there was a story that went viral about a Lubavitcher who was, who was stranded for Shabbos in, whether it was Kiryas Joel or Monroe, I don't remember. But he was very worried about spending Shabbos there, and he ended up being invited to someone's home, and they had a lovely Shabbos. And after Havdalah, stop me if you know the story, but after Havdalah, he told his host that he was really anxious because his last time in this community fifteen years earlier, he was giving a Tanya shiur when the door busted open and a bunch of young guys came in, disturbed the room, and in fact, someone lifted a bench and was waving it, and it hit him in the head. I didn't know if the guy intended it. But that was his last memory in this community, and here he was stranded for Shabbos. He was very, very scared, and it turned out to be the loveliest Shabbos he ever had, and he made friends with people he never knew. And, uh, the man looks at him and says, "Fifteen years I'm begging the Ribono Shel Olam three times a day to put me back in touch with the man whose head I hit with a bench so that I can ask him for forgiveness. And finally, the Ribono Shel Olam gave me the opportunity."

09:07 Speaker 2 Is it true story?

09:08 Speaker 1 Well, at the time, I, I hadn't researched it, but it was, it was viral. It was, it was reported by the person it happened to. But-

09:15 Speaker 2 I'd love for it, I'd love for it to be true

09:16 Speaker 1 ... my point being whether the story is true or not, these kinds of truths-

09:21 Speaker 2 Yeah

09:21 Speaker 1 ... are hidden. They, they get, they get shunted aside because we have the narrative of all of the tensions we had.

09:28 Speaker 2 Yeah.

09:29 Speaker 1 But the individual people, I mean, th-definitely there are some people who are just wild, crazy radicals, but that's not the entire community, and these radicals grow up.

09:38 Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah. Look, I grew up in Hong Kong, so I, I was, I was in many ways shielded from this narrative anyway because a lot of the... You know, Hong Kong in many ways was one of the first places where, uh, Chassidish, including Satmar, even, uh, David and Chabad House. We're talking back in the late '80s, early '90s. Um, there was no other choice. You know, at the end of the day, I, I once joked that, like, the amount of Kiruv Lubav is that the talent of Chabad of Hong Kong was responsible for is, is unbelievable. Like, people at the end of the day, you know, they can hate, they can hate your ideology from day till tomorrow, but on a long Shabbos afternoon when they're hungry and they smell the talent, all, like, ideology very often melts away.

10:24 Speaker 1 My chaver Shimon Freidloch.

10:26 Speaker 2 Yeah. So he started, he started in Hong Kong.

10:27 Speaker 1 In Beij- he started in Hong Kong, exactly.

10:30 Speaker 2 Yeah.

10:30 Speaker 1 And then in Beijing. And he has so many friendships and even Balabatim in the Satmar community.

10:35 Speaker 2 Yeah.

10:35 Speaker 1 It's certainly not the same community it was in the '70s, but my point is that even then they showed incredible chessed to my grandmother.

10:41 Speaker 2 Right. But there were-

10:42 Speaker 1 And then they discriminated against us as Lubavitchers.

10:44 Speaker 2 Yeah. That's a very, a very interesting point. It's a very interesting point. And, um, yeah, I think, I think there's a, a, I think there's something... You know, and also, even if we're talking about this narrative for a second, you know, Lubavitchers are going in there and teaching Tanya. Like, what do you expect them? To be thrilled about it? You know, so my, my, my, my point is not to litigate that story here. I, I, I don't know enough about it, and I'm sure there's, there's a lot more to it. But my point, my point is more like yours, that there are, you know, history or reality is, is always gonna be more complex than the narratives that are formed to tell them later. And, you know, you could use-- you could talk about this specific case, or you could use that as example in general, where, you know, the need to kind of funnel all of history, you know. You know, like, everybody today is talking about the Strait of Hormuz, how there's a choke point on the world's oil because there's a bunch of, there's a few crazies that, uh, more than a few crazies that, like, have, have militaries-

11:45 Speaker 1 Car hijacking it

11:46 Speaker 2 ... have militaries right there. And we do that with history all the time. We take everything that happened and all the different viewpoints and all the complexity-

11:53 Speaker 1 That's a wonderful analogy, and we're putting it through a chokehold

11:56 Speaker 2 Through a chokehold that, like, this is what happened

11:58 Speaker 1 Like Chassidus talks about the Meitzer HaGara, and it all has to flow through that very narrow channel of the narrative of the tensions between Lubavitch and Satmar. But yeah, there were good people on both sides I, I hate to use that term That's a bad term. But the point is-

12:13 Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah

12:13 Speaker 1 ... it's not the entire story. It's not black and white

12:14 Speaker 2 You're, you're about to get canceled for that.

12:16 Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm gonna be canceled in a second and a half.

12:18 Speaker 2 Yeah, you live in Canada, it's okay.

12:21 Speaker 1 But again, it-- there, there were good people and, and, uh, our family were the recipients of that goodness. Um-

12:27 Speaker 2 That's great

12:27 Speaker 1 ... but going back to your initial question about my origins, that just introduced the fact that my grandmother came here as an agunah. So when she came to America, she called herself, she spelled Gurkow with an H because the acrylic H in the Russian alphabet has a G sound. So when she spelled out Gurkow when she came, when she wrote out her papers, it was H-U-R-K-O-W. And my father's family came to London and spelled it G-U-R-K-O-W because they used the American, uh, ABC, and so... Well, in that case, the British ABC. So when my parents got married, it was Gurkow married Hurkow, but in reality-

13:04 Speaker 2 Gurkow married Hurkow

13:04 Speaker 1 ... they were really first cousins.

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14:21 Speaker 1 You mean my mother's father?

14:23 Speaker 2 Your grandfather.

14:23 Speaker 1 My mother's father or my father's father? Which grandfather?

14:25 Speaker 2 Oh, they both pa- they both passed away.

14:27 Speaker 1 Well, by now they're both gone, but-

14:28 Speaker 2 No, no, but the one that, the one that was lost to-

14:30 Speaker 1 The one that was lost was missing in action during the war.

14:33 Speaker 2 He was taken-

14:34 Speaker 1 It was not a KGB purge

14:35 Speaker 2 ... he was taken into the army.

14:36 Speaker 1 He was drafted into the army when my mother was six months old.

14:40 Speaker 2 Okay.

14:40 Speaker 1 And for the first little while, he was sending letters home, and then he stopped, and the last thing my mother's-- my grandmother heard was that he was lost behind enemy lines. I know that a lot of research was done. Um, my niece got married, and my nephew, Mendel Suber, by marriage, has done a lot of research along with, along with my brother, his father-in-law, my brother Zalman, and we still haven't been able to identify his kevér. A lot of people who've not been able to find their grandparents' kevér in Russia were assisted by various organizations and shluchim in Russia who have been able to help, but we haven't had such luck.

15:18 Speaker 2 Yeah, my great-grandfather-

15:19 Speaker 1 So we've heard that he was lost behind enemy lines, and that's the last we know.

15:22 Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, who said he has a kevér? Right? You're saying, like, a mass, a mass, a mass, a mass grave possibly.

15:29 Speaker 1 Yeah.

15:29 Speaker 2 Yeah.

15:29 Speaker 1 And listen, there were three places where people with names like his are listed in cemeteries, but none of them turned out to be his. I don't know the details-

15:38 Speaker 2 Uh-huh

15:38 Speaker 1 ... as well as my brother does.

15:40 Speaker 2 Yeah, my great-grandfather, my great-grandfather, Lazaro, my grandmother Shemtov's father, Eliezer Gershom Lazaro, also was, was snatched off, uh, the street wherever they were living back then in Russia, so in the Soviet Union, and drafted into the army and, uh, conscripted into the army and, um, yeah, that was that. Uh, I think she saw him once while he was in the, like, she was allowed to visit him once. And she, she had my grandmother, who was, I think, about a year old or, or some- maybe even less, and she was expecting my great-uncle, Shimon Lazaro. And that was the last she saw of him. But she found out somehow. She, sh- d- with her, there was an a- there was an aide that, that was able to release her of her, both of her being an agunah and as well, like you described, her hope-

16:32 Speaker 1 That-

16:32 Speaker 2 ... that he would come back

16:33 Speaker 1 ... he would come back. Yeah. Wow. So this was a generation that experienced a lot of tragedy.

16:38 Speaker 2 Yeah.

16:39 Speaker 1 And my parents were born into this generation. They did not have an easy youth. They did-- they weren't born in, in, in a stable, loving, comfortable, balanced environment in which a child should be nourished and should be able to flourish and let their own identity develop and unfold. Uh, they had to constantly suppress because there was danger at all times, whether it-

17:01 Speaker 2 What was wrong with your father's parents?

17:03 Speaker 1 Nothing was wrong with my father's parents.

17:05 Speaker 2 Uh, just the KGB.

17:06 Speaker 1 Thank God.

17:06 Speaker 2 You said the KGB.

17:06 Speaker 1 No, there was the fear of the KGB until the war. Then came the war, and they had to flee to Samarkand, to the-

17:11 Speaker 2 Right

17:11 Speaker 1 ... south of the Soviet Union. And then after the war was over, the KGB concerns arose again, and then the escape to-

17:18 Speaker 2 Poland

17:18 Speaker 1 ... yeah, the escape to Poland. And so th- these were very tumultuous, traumatic times, and they left a deep imprint on this generation. So those who are children of survivors, they have their issues to deal with. But we in the Lubavitch community, for the most part, our ancestors were spir- shielded from the war, but we have our own set of traumas.

17:39 Speaker 2 Yeah.

17:40 Speaker 1 And so being raised by parents who didn't have a stable environment means that some of that trauma filtered through into the next generation.

17:50 Speaker 2 Oh, there, there, there was, there was certainly trauma. You know, it, there's a very interesting-- it's, it's very interesting to think about that, you know, uh, h- how this also affects our theology, right? Because, you know, you speak to Chassidishe people and their theology of, let's say, of, of, of evil or their theology of emunah is In many ways shaped by what happened at the Holocaust, which is something terrible, an atrocity happened. We had zero, we had zero ways of fighting back, and we just basically, you know, for those who stayed steadfast in their emunah, we had to accept this gezirah with emunah. Like, the-they- we were, you know, they were like sheep taken to the slaughter. There was no... It, it was the purest, uh, purest expression of, of, of, of, of, you know, saying c- uh, be- sheep being taken to the-

18:42 Speaker 1 Tza'an l'tevach.

18:44 Speaker 2 Tza'an l'tevach, um, yvul vad zo.

18:45 Speaker 1 Yeah.

18:46 Speaker 2 Right? And, um, Lubavitchers have a very different theology because we have, we had the Stalinists, and they were, they were, um, they, they were, you know, they were coming after us, but then we fought back.

19:03 Speaker 1 With everything.

19:04 Speaker 2 We fought back, and we won.

19:05 Speaker 1 We were w- we were willing to, like, even risk our lives. When you always say when somebody's in a corner and he's not afraid to die, that's the most dangerous opponent. That was us.

19:14 Speaker 2 Right. But even more than that, our theology also includes the end where we won.

19:19 Speaker 1 Where we won.

19:20 Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, they, they fell, and we're still here, right? And you, and you described this flourishing and so on over there and where we went on to go. You know, so there, there's a very... Uh, so what I mean, why, why I bring that up is because our theology is, is one where, in a way, we don't deal with the, like, we don't, we don't actually acknowledge, I mean, of course we do when you're serious- when you think about it seriously, but on a, on a popu- like, on a, on a, uh, like, on a colloquial level, you know, it's, it's, it's the, the antagonist is, is, is, is, is, is not almighty, right? You know, the, the, the tyrant is, the tyrant is, is somebody that we can fight.

20:03 Speaker 1 He's defeatable.

20:04 Speaker 2 He's defeatable, right? And I think, I think that that changes how we, to your, uh, to your point, it changes how we view trauma. Like, who? Us traumatized? Like, like, like, like, the, you talk to Chassidishe people, their grandparents, the survivors very rarely spoke about it, but, but no one, no one thought for a second that they weren't sur-

20:27 Speaker 1 That they weren't traumatized

20:28 Speaker 2 ... that they weren't survivors.

20:29 Speaker 1 Right.

20:30 Speaker 2 Right? Whereas with Lubavitchers, we have a whole narrative that no, you know, nothing we're fine. W-we-we came out better than ever.

20:39 Speaker 1 Right.

20:39 Speaker 2 And, and it just, it just-

20:40 Speaker 1 So our response to challenge is to fight back with everything we have with absolute confidence that we will prevail.

20:47 Speaker 2 Right.

20:47 Speaker 1 And so that's good because that's why we became a worldwide network, and there's this ambition and aggressiveness that really defines a Lubavitch shliach wherever they might be. The confidence that a 22-year-old has to walk into a new community and just start doing things despite all the criticism, and if my parents and grandparents could overcome Stalin, then I can overcome the Federation's resistance.

21:12 Speaker 2 Right.

21:13 Speaker 1 Um, but it's true at the same time, it doesn't give you the opportunity to explore your own pain and your own trauma, and therefore, it just gets un- it's, it's not addressed.

21:25 Speaker 2 It's not addressed.

21:25 Speaker 1 And it comes out in unhealthy ways.

21:29 Speaker 2 Yes, it does. Yes, it does. Is there a specific point you, you, you, you are keen on talking about, or you just, or we, we leave it at that?

21:37 Speaker 1 You mean specifically about the trauma?

21:39 Speaker 2 No. Well, uh, not, not so much trauma per se, but, but the, the unhealthy... Where do you see this? You, you said, you said because it's not dealt with, it expresses itself in unhealthy ways. Where, where do you see that?

21:52 Speaker 1 I think the, the most prevail- the, the most prevalent way in which I see this addressed, again, we're talking about a generation that the children of that generation are now in their 50s and 60s. And so the-

22:04 Speaker 2 Right

22:04 Speaker 1 ... parents, my parents, your grandparents, um, their way of parenting or their way of teaching was always, uh, top-down. It was dictatorial. It was, if there is some pushback, then the way we deal with it is pushing back 10 times as hard because that's how we survived Stalin. That's how we survived communism. And the Rebbe is a completely different paradigm because he went through the same suffering that all of the Lubavitchers did living in the Soviet Union, as the Rebbe himself recounted being called into the KGB offices and being interrogated and needing to show no fear and no, no anxiety whatsoever, no weakness, and yet when somebody brought a problem to the Rebbe, he addressed it with empathy. There was very-- Empathy was lacking a lot in that generation, and not because they were bad people, but because it wasn't cultivated in them. They were raised to know that they're in danger, it's fight or flight, and that's how you deal with challenge. It doesn't work when you're raising children. It doesn't work when you're cultivating students. And so that's why that generation, that's why I said the trauma filters down into that generation as well. And everyone's particular story is different 'cause personality, every personality influences the way you let trauma filter through you and how healthy or unhealthy your experience with it is. So my, r- the way I was raised by my parents might be different from the way your, your mother was raised by her parents. But be that as it

23:46 Speaker 1 may, that generation had to contend with a trauma that it didn't acknowledge, as opposed to, as you're pointing out, the survivors, their trauma, whether they acknowledged it or not, at least until it became more popular to talk about the Holocaust, at least everybody knew it was out in the open. Everybody knew that they were traumatized.

24:05 Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, my, my point is not to say that I think necessarily that, that other communities have it better figured out. Everyone's... Look, these things were catastrophes, and they were cataclysmic, and, and, you know, it's only, what is it, 70, uh, 70, 80 years ago. And, and, and so it, it makes sense that we're still unwinding these things and, and, and grappling with them. Um, but I, I think there's a difference in the way, in the way, in the way it expressed itself and the way people felt it. I don't know necessarily that the... Like, I'm not, I'm not pining for what they went through, God forbid. I mean, what they went through was horrific, and they're dealing with their own-

24:43 Speaker 1 Nobody wants that.

24:44 Speaker 2 No, no, obviously.

24:45 Speaker 1 Yeah.

24:45 Speaker 2 So I didn't even phrase it right, but I'm saying, like, I'm not even pining for the way they raised their kids. You know, the- there was a lot of trauma there too.

24:52 Speaker 1 Oh, I know children of survivors.

24:53 Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

24:54 Speaker 1 And they have issues, and it filters through into the way they way-- they raise their children.

25:00 Speaker 2 Right.

25:00 Speaker 1 So the grandchildren of survivors are finally able to process these traumas and hopefully not pass it on to their children. But it, it does get filtered and diminished in each generation. Clearly, the trauma of the grandchildren is lesser than the trauma of the children, which is of course lesser than the trauma of the survivors. But it impacts your personality, and in a way it makes you raw in a kinda like a sca- a, a wound that's scabbed over. But on the other hand, it also gives you a certain strength. So I would say, and I often do say, that the strongest generation in our times is the generation of the survivors. They came here broken, shattered, completely bereft, one out of 10, one out of 20. Like we say, "Chamoshi malubnei Yisrael mimitzrayim" one out of five. The s- the survivors were one out of 35.

25:50 Speaker 3 Yeah.

25:50 Speaker 1 And they married, and they had children, and they built families, and they created careers, enough to be able to support their children through proper schooling, even in the non-Jew-- frum community. So they went there, kids became professionals. Now their children are doing very well for themselves. They created, they built from scratch. So they have that strength. Yes, they were broken shards of vessels, but these traumatized people were powerful, powerful heroes in my eyes.

26:18 Speaker 3 Right. No, absolutely. It's unfathomable. You know, whenever you hear a story of, like, people getting married in the most desperate circumstances, and like, you're gonna have a family, the world, y-y-you-- the world's over. Like, e-everything you knew is gone, and you're gonna start a family? Like-

26:35 Speaker 1 Yeah.

26:35 Speaker 3 And they did.

26:36 Speaker 1 And they did.

26:36 Speaker 3 One after, one after another. But-

26:39 Speaker 1 And so when I take it back to my parents and the Lubavitch story, these people also are victims of circumstance.

26:45 Speaker 3 Yeah.

26:45 Speaker 1 Terrible circumstance. And again, like you pointed out before, they had the benefit of having that charge, that strength, that confidence that we can overcome. This is defeatable, like we said earlier. But it took a lot of strength. And this was the generation with whom the Rebbe built the international network that is today Lubavitch.

27:05 Speaker 3 Right.

27:06 Speaker 1 They were the pioneers. They came into an America that wasn't hospitable to their message. And because they were so strengthened, they, you know, because they were forged in the flames of communism, uh, and fighting communism, they were able to come here and do what needed to be done. So their weakness is their strength. You know, "Kal kolason zeh ot hakonoson." And their strengths are part of their weakness. And so what you need in order to build an organization against resistance doesn't work so well for raising children. But what you need for raising children wouldn't have enabled you to build this incredible empire that Lubavitch is today and reach all the Yidden that we do, which was the Rebbe's vision. The Rebbe was able to accommodate both. He had empathy, and he had the vision and the ambition. But most people don't have that ability, so there is a fallout. But nevertheless, um, we have to acknowledge it. We don't have to dwell in it.

28:05 Speaker 3 Homesick for Lubavitch is brought to you by Yuvala Media, a boutique video production company servicing the Chabad and Jewish community. Since opening 10 years ago, Yuvala Media has pushed the boundaries of artistic and thoughtful storytelling in the community with an insistence on there always being a memorable story as well as a beautiful and striking visual image that we believe is second to none. Over the years, we have worked with Chabad organizations around the country, as well as large organizations like Boniolum, Torah Umesora, and Athalathon, guided by the belief that your story is absolutely worth telling with depth and creativity. If you are looking to tell your story with a video, please reach out to us at hello@yuvalamedia.com. Again, that is hello@yuvalamedia.com. A link can be found in the show notes. And now, back to the podcast. So let's get to the Rebbe in a moment, but I, I first wanna open up a little bit what you're discussing here. Um, y-y-you, you-- I, I agree with you that, that on one hand, there's trauma, and with that, there are things that, that are negatives or have negative, um, implications, uh, or, or, um, detrimental implications in, in downstream of that trauma. But, you know, the, the other word that you used was, you know, to-- it, it lacks empathy, and today people have more empathy. How do we make sure, in your mind, how does one make sure that empathy is not there because of weakness? Right? You, you said that the, those people were

29:43 Speaker 3 stronger, so in a way they lacked empathy. They were, they were, they were fighters. They didn't have patience or empathy to deal with a child who had questions or, uh, didn't want-- didn't live up to their expectations. Um, today there's a lot of talk about empathy, but I think it's, I, I, I think it's, it's also obvious that empathy can very often come from a place of weakness, s-- um, even laziness, where, or, or, or just, m-- you know, uh, um, may-maybe the word is a lack of courage, where I'm, you know, I-- it's, it's easy to be empathetic to someone in the sense that I'll go with what he says, with what my child says, and give up my own values, right? 'Cause it's, it's hard to stand up and, you know, your child wants a ca-- you know, the, the obvious example, your child wants candies for, for, for breakfast. And if you wanna make them happy, and you're empathetic to them, and I know that's not what you mean by empathy, but I'm, I'm just teasing it out. You know, you, you're, you're kind to them, you'll give them what they want, but that's not what they need, right? And it's harder to, you know, deal with your child being upset at you and call-- you know, saying, "I hate you," or whatever it is that they say. And you realize that that's part of... You know, so how do you, how do-- in your mind, how do you... Is there a

31:01 Speaker 3 way to have empathy without sacrificing the strength And the, the fortitude that the earlier people had.

31:10 Speaker 1 Absolutely. Because while empathy and weakness might look similar on the surface, it doesn't take a lot of digging to find the difference. The question is, who's getting their way? Who's getting their way? Are the parents ruling-- Are the pa- are the children ruling the roost? Is there chaos in the house? Do the children get anything and everything they want? Or is the direction set by the parents, but not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way where the children feel heard and they feel that their concerns are felt. And the way that is done is that where possible, you give the children what they want because it doesn't impact the overall direction. When, when you come at from a state of strength and dictation and power, then you're afraid to let your child have their way at any point. You're afraid to ever acknowledge a mistake. You're ever afraid to ever acknowledge that you were wrong, and you're afraid to ever step down from a position you took. But if you're coming at it from a position that is soft but not weak, then you still remain the one who ultimately makes the decision, only your child feels, feels heard and loved. Now, that doesn't mean your child is going to express that love and that admiration when they don't get their way. But the question is what happens ten years down the line, the accumulative experience of the child when they look back. Do they think, "I had a good parent who loved me

32:39 Speaker 1 even though I didn't like every decision?" If I was forced to wash my cup and put it away every time I used it, as opposed to letting it pile up in the sink so that somebody else can clean it at the end of the day, I didn't like it at the time, but was I made to feel like a nothing and a schmatta and a nobody because I did that and forced to clean? Or was I felt-- was I made to feel empowered that, you know, you could do this, and this is the rule of the house, and I believe you really could, so go ahead and prove it to yourself. Empathy and weakness are really, really different, although they have some commonality really on the very top surface, I'd say on the top centimeter of the surface.

33:15 Speaker 3 If I wanna push back a little bit on that, because it's... I, I understand what you're saying that in terms of if you have the same problem, right? A kid doesn't wanna wash their, their glass. You can deal with it in a very, like, top-down, heavy manner, where if you don't do this, I am going to XYZ. Or you could, you know, tell them you, you could approach it in a softer way. But what about where-- what about instances where the, where your values come into conflict with, with, with what your child wants? So I, so I'll back up for a second. I'll frame it for you. Okay. One of the things that people talk about today a lot is that, you know, their parents put Yiddishkeit before their kids, and today we don't do that. And, you know, I'm not here go-even going to take sides, although you might guess what I think about it. But, you know, let's just frame it where the, the way it's being discussed is that, you know, when parents insisted that their kids, I don't know, get up, got up for a minyan or benched after the meal, or did XYZ for Shabbos, whatever it is, they saw I didn't wanna do it, and they pushed me to do it anyway. And to them, that was the priority, even if it meant that I was miserable doing it. Today, I won't do that to my kids. Okay, so what happens to Chinuch?

34:42 Speaker 1 Oh, so you're-

34:43 Speaker 3 Yeah.

34:43 Speaker 1 That's your question.

34:44 Speaker 3 That's my question.

34:45 Speaker 1 Yeah.

34:45 Speaker 3 My, my question is, my question is, you know, w-we're not only, only talking about methodology here. We're talking about the fact that people have, you know, there are values that, that, that, that become challenging to impart to your child. Your child doesn't wanna do it, and you s-- and, and, and, and the old school says these values are paramount, and I'm not going to wilt under the, the pressure of, you know, of, of, of, you know, my kid not liking me in the moment because I'm, because I'm insisting on something. And, and the, the n- the newer way of saying it, the newer s- the new school is no, like, if your kid doesn't want it, then you can't do it. I mean, like, the extreme example of that is like now, you know, I got flack online for suggesting that Maggid by the Seder should be longer than, I don't know, a half hour or forty-five minutes because kids today can't handle more. Right? So, uh, they, they... How do you, how do you, how, how in your mind do you reconcile the old way of like, there are values that we impart, even if it means that our kids don't like it with, with what you suggest as empathy?

35:51 Speaker 1 So I don't wanna out my children, but I have had a learning curve as a parent, and I don't know if you've ever had the opportunity to interview Zalman Leib Markovits.

36:01 Speaker 3 No.

36:01 Speaker 1 But he's been an incredible resource for me, and I remain eternally grateful to him. So one example is one of my children would get very upset when I would say that the rule of the house is that when we finish eating, everybody helps to clear the table. And others would always balk whenever it was time for us to sit down and learn something together. And I would call Zalman Leib, and I would say, "What do I do with this child? I don't understand. "" I'm tearing the hair out of my head." And Zalman Leib says to me, "Well, did you ever find a normal child who likes to clear his table? Did you ever find a normal child, an exuberant, healthy child who chooses voluntarily to sit down and study no matter with whom, even his father, maybe especially his father? You know, these are normal things, and you're trying to push them into what's abnormal for them." And he said, "If you keep modeling what you want them to be without forcing them in an oppressive way into behaviors that they don't want now, that eventually they will pick up on that." So I think that it's a false equation. You're, you're offering two options, but they don't-- Th-there is a third option. You're suggesting either it's Judaism or it's love. And I think from all of the guidance we have from the Rebbe about raising students as well as children, the Rebbe always insisted that Judaism is filled with love, and that if

37:33 Speaker 1 we offer Judaism with love, then we can have both. I think that it's a false narrative to suppose that it's either one or the other.

37:43 Speaker 3 I-

37:43 Speaker 1 And if we, if we fa-- If, if we succumb to that narrative as parents, I think it is a sign of laziness within ourselves. We didn't dig deep enough to find a way to bring both of them together because they are inherently one.

37:57 Speaker 3 Fair enough. However, what I would say to that is that I see that model working in Chabad houses. You know, I grew up in a Chabad house. I see... You're talking about the Rebbe and, and his model of, of Yiddish-- of, of, of Chinuch, let's say. I've seen it work in Chabad houses, right? 'Cause Chabad houses, uh, in Chabad houses, you have this model very openly where you do-- you come at your pace, you do it at your pace, right? And, and you could say with tremendous success. We see how it works. Okay? But at the same time, that, that model does not work for your own kids. I mean, maybe the concept and the principle is still true, but I, I don't see how that model translates. A pa- a parent raising their child, a frum parent raising their child, um, um, or maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think a frum pa-- any frum parent raising their child believes that, "Oh, my kid doesn't wanna keep Shabbos this week. I'm okay with that." If my kid doesn't wanna... Even simpler, even simpler, my kid doesn't wanna come to the Shabbos table, okay. Whoever wants to come, comes. Whoever doesn't wanna come, doesn't come. You know, laissez-faire. We're just gonna-- We're-- Mommy, Daddy are doing Shabbos, and you come if you want. You know, there is a difference. There is, there is a difference between sharing Yiddishkeit with someone who you don't inherently feel responsible for, you didn't bring into this world, right? And

39:21 Speaker 3 a person who you did, right? And so-

39:24 Speaker 1 And, and what is the difference? Let's dig down. Why do I feel so different? Is it because I feel inherently responsible? Because we all buy in as Lubavitchers that we are Areivim Ze la Ze. We are responsible for our s- for our brother Jews. So is it because my child is my responsibility, and I have to discharge my obligation to God? Or is it a fear of being perceived in the community as a failure, that I failed to raise my children this way? Is there an inherent insecurity within myself? I failed to be a father who successfully raised this child, therefore I have to bear down.

40:03 Speaker 3 I, I think there's, there's very often it's the latter, fair. I think very often people are, are, are, are, are, are seeing their child. They're worried about what people are gonna say about them. But I also think that that's an over, oversimplification. I think that's an oversimplif-sim-simplification because that's not the only reason why. Like you... Yes, we say that we're Areivim Ze la Ze, but I, look, I, I grew up with parents who are, were phenomenally dedicated shluchim. I met a lot of phenomenally dedicated shluchim. I, I, I don't know if there are any shluchim, and certainly very few, who feel the same way if, God forbid, something happens to their child as they do it. You know, a child is a child.

40:44 Speaker 1 I totally agree. No, let's not go over the top.

40:47 Speaker 3 Right.

40:47 Speaker 1 Every s-- Like we said earlier about the black and white, about the Satmar Lubavitch situation-

40:51 Speaker 3 Right

40:51 Speaker 1 ... the same is true when we talk about ideas.

40:53 Speaker 3 Right.

40:53 Speaker 1 It's not black and white. There's a whole, there's a whole range of subtlety in between. It's a spectrum. So yeah, I'm not gonna suggest that we buy into the notion of Areivim Ze la Ze to the extent that as it would be when a Rebbe hears about another person bleeding, that he would feel the same way he would feel about his own child bleeding. We're not at that stage. We're somewhere on that spectrum, true. But I'm saying ideologically, we buy into that, and yet we don't feel that sense of responsibility. And then therefore, I'm not suggesting that it's entirely d- based on our own insecurity. Of course, we disguise it as something holy and something... And religion is always a perfect disguise for weaknesses because religion gives us a structure, it gives us rules, and we can hide our own insecurities, weaknesses, fears, failures behind those rules.

41:39 Speaker 3 Right.

41:40 Speaker 1 And so that's why people who are religious and OCD, very often it's hard to identify it because they could come across-

41:46 Speaker 3 'Cause you-

41:47 Speaker 1 ... as extremely, extremely religious when really it's just a matter of OCD.

41:50 Speaker 3 You can identify it if they come and tell you to move your tzitzit in shul.

41:54 Speaker 1 So, uh, you know, that, that disguises itself very, very easily. So we can disguise our own insecurities as a devotion to Chinuch. But I wanna step away from that because I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a therapist. I can't go around and say, "You're insecure. You're insecure." I wanna get back to the practicalities of your question. So what happens if a child doesn't wanna come to the Shabbos table? What happens if a child doesn't wanna come to Shabbat, to observe Shabbos, period? I think that there's a progression. It starts with, "I don't wanna come to the Shabbos table," and then it proceeds to, "I don't wanna keep Shabbos." And if coming to the Shabbos table is torture, then that, this spills over to all of Shabbos. I don't want anything to do with it. If coming to the Shabbos table is pleasant, then that doesn't translate, spill over to the rest of Shabbos. Of course, everybody could have their own path and come to their own conclusions as they get older. That's a different story. But as far as what we can do as parents. So the question becomes twofold: What standards do we impose, and what do we do when our children don't consist-- keep to our standards? So what standards do we impose? I can tell you in our home, we always say there are certain times that you have to be at the table because it's Shabbos. And then if you're bored because the, us adults are having conversation and we're not

43:08 Speaker 1 ready to wrap it up and you are, by all means, go and play. Go read on the couch. Go do whatever you want. We'll call you back when it's the next one. So my mother, for example, had a rule, you don't get dessert if you don't eat the main course, right? So we don't have that rule in the house. If the kids wanna come back for the main course, then the main course. The main thing is that they know that Shabbos entails the experience with the family around the Shabbos table, and in our case, often with guests 'cause we're shluchim. Um, I shouldn't even say that because if you're, if you're a balabus, you often also have guests. Um, be that as it may, adults have more capacity for sitting for longer times-

43:46 Speaker 3 Sure

43:46 Speaker 1 ... in conversation. Children have less. So our rules say, "You have to be there for Kiddush, you have to make a Motzei, you have to eat a little bit so that we know you're not hungry. And if you wanna go play, go play. We'll let you know when is the next course." Right?

43:59 Speaker 3 Right.

43:59 Speaker 1 Um, what happens if they don't? What happens if they say, "I'm not coming to Kiddush"? So I recall a gem story for, uh, Rabbi Nuparshtik. I don't remember his first name. His son is Shmulik Nuparshtik, Yoske Nuparshtik. Um, he was in Chabad, and he was in the han- he was in the hanhala of the yeshiva, and he was interviewed on Gem. This was back a long, long time ago. The interview was at the very early time, rather early years of Gem. And there was a disagreement in the hanhala about what to do with bachurim when they weren't coming to Seder. And it wasn't really his place to ask the Rebbe to dis- to determine what to do because some members of hanhala said to punish, some members of hanhala said to be more tolerant, and he felt that tolerance was gonna be more effective. And, um, when he went to Yefidas, he was concerned about asking the question because he thought he'd might get flack from the hanhala, "Who are you to ask this question?" To put it to the Rebbe. We didn't decide we're ready to put it to the Rebbe yet, but he did put it to the Rebbe, and the Rebbe said, "It's always been the case, but it's so much truer in our generation that you get through with Yimid Mekarev so much more than Smelta. And the Rebbe encouraged him not to punish the children at all. Um, but, but these, these are bachurim, not children.

45:13 Speaker 3 Right.

45:13 Speaker 1 And so these are teenagers who, when you try and, and bear down on them, it's counterproductive. And the Rebbe said that they should be more tolerant with that. I remember on one occasion, I came across a letter from the Rebbe about Menahem, who wrote to the Rebbe saying that there are students who are coming from a long distance. They're driving like an hour or so to school, and despite all the parents' best efforts, they're coming late. They're disturbing school. They come in the middle of davening. What should we do with them? Should we insist that they have to come earlier? And the Rebbe says, "Well, no. Recognize why it's happening. They're driving an hour, and create a separate system for them. Let them daven at home and allow them to come after davening, so it won't disturb the children." Find a way that can reconcile both the needs of this child and that child or within the same child, this need and that need. And if we, if we are not lazy and we dig deep and we really try and work hard, and we do what the Rebbe of Shabbos said, we really spend time every day thinking about what does our child need most. So if my child, who for example is out of the house for high school for four years straight during the teenage years, I know what that's like 'cause we didn't get to my story yet, but-

46:19 Speaker 3 We're gonna get to it though

46:19 Speaker 1 ... I did leave the house at a young age. And she'll call and say, "You know what? I, I have to come home. I'm, I'm really, really feeling stressed. I miss home. I need to relax. I need to decompress." So on the one hand, oh my goodness, you're gonna miss a whole week of school. You can't just do that. That's irresponsible, right? And indeed, if it becomes a pattern and it would happen all the time, that would become a concern, and we'd have to find out why, and we'd have to look at, at it strategically and see if it's the wrong school, if she needs to be home or whatever it is. But if it happens, then I have to respect my child that she's reached a point where her li- where her pot is about to bur- boil over and her lid's about to come off. Um, but I could just stand up firm and say, "No way. You can't come home. This is, this is a very important time for you. This is high school. This is when you're gonna learn your discipline. This is, this is when you're gonna realize in life that just because you're tired today doesn't mean you don't have to nurse your child. Your child needs to eat, and so whether you're tired or not, you're waking up at three AM to nurse them. You're gonna learn by recognizing that when you thought you were at the end of your rope, you stayed in, in school another hour,

47:26 Speaker 1 another week, another month." That's counterproductive.

47:29 Speaker 3 Right.

47:29 Speaker 1 That's not gonna work.

47:30 Speaker 3 But how do you square this, this idea that there was folk like Yimid Mekarevis with the ideas that are also spoken about by the Rebbe about Kabbalah and um-

47:42 Speaker 1 Fascinating question. I remember so clearly listening to the Rebbe as a child talk to both in, in the same Sikha. And then as an adult, I went back and learned the Hanha. In the same Sikha, the Rebbe talks to the Hanhala, and then the Rebbe talks to the Bachram, and the Rebbe gives each a chelek. He laces into each of them for not living up to their responsibilities, to their, to what's expected of them. And he never said anything to the Hanhala about how it's important for the Bachram to have Kabbalah soil. He always talked about the Hanhalas responsibilities to the Bachram.

48:12 Speaker 3 Right.

48:13 Speaker 1 And then he never said anything to the Bachram about the fact that there might not be lunch on the table.

48:18 Speaker 3 Right.

48:18 Speaker 1 He s- always talked to the Bachram about Kabbalah soil and

48:22 Speaker 3 Right.

48:22 Speaker 1 So we have to not, uh, take on somebody else's role. I mean, this is after all, first day of Parshas Korach where we-

48:31 Speaker 3 Right

48:31 Speaker 1 ... Maisha says, "Biker yeda Hashem es asher lai." And now she says, "Just like biker has its time, so does, uh, Kai and Gadol have its person." And the Rebbe brings out in the Sikha-

48:40 Speaker 3 Hashem made, Hashem made a Kabbalist in this world.

48:43 Speaker 1 Yeah. And the Rebbe says in the Sikha, that means every person has his role, and if one person plays the other person's role, it doesn't work. Like the famous story where the Bala, the rich Balabus and the, and the Balagala arrived in town in, in time for Shabbos, and then it turned out that the Balagala went to Shul first, and he was saying Shirat Shirim, and the Balabus came to Shul a little later, and he ended up being recruited to help somebody else whose horse had turned over in the mud. And you know, both of them did good things, but neither of them did them well because they weren't doing their job. So let's take it back to parents. Yes, the children have to have Kabbalah soil, but while we teach them about Kabbalah soil, we can't insist on Kabbalah soil because respect is earned. It's never demanded.

49:35 Speaker 3 Right.

49:35 Speaker 1 You don't get respect from demanding, so we won't gain Kabbalah soil by insisting on it.

49:40 Speaker 3 Right.

49:43 Speaker 1 It's not our role to, to enforce Kabbalah soil. It's our role to teach about Kabbalah soil.

49:51 Speaker 3 No, no, th- that, that, that part I understand. The... And, and, and the idea, the idea of, of, of the parent's responsibility and obligations to the child is, is well taken. Y- you know, you, you cannot see it just as, um, I'm a parent and this is what my child owes me. There are certainly the other side of it, which is as a parent, what do I owe them? And, and to conflate the two is very often the-- what, what, what leads to a lot of these problems. Like, why isn't the child doing what I want? And it's like that's, that's the question that you need to get them to ask for themselves, but like why aren't they doing the right thing? Your que- the question that you ask yourself is different. Although a parent in a way does have to worry about both or an educator as well, but I, I, I, I, I understand that. I understand that distinction. I think it's more a question of when we talk about, and this goes back to earlier how sometimes narratives get sh- get kind of narrowed down into one lane, you know, there's... And, and this will lead us back to your story as well, I believe. You know, the, the... I sometimes struggle or I sometimes have a problem with how the narratives about, the narrative about the Rebbe is presented where, and, and I'm not accusing you of this, God forbid, but when convenient, the Rebbe is Chesed, and when, when not

51:15 Speaker 3 convenient or when convenient otherwise, the Rebbe is, you know, Yichudat Din Hasahar, right? And, you know, it's the same person, and it seems like there's almost like a it is what you want it to be, or it is what, you know, what, what, what, what we want it to be in this given moment. You know, like ultimately, what was-- the, the Rebbe was very, very strong about standards, extremely strong about standards. Um, you know, there, there was, there was no room for compromise, zero room for compromise, right? And then at the same time, we talk about, you know, Chesed and Nimin Mikareves and tolerance, if that's the right word. But, you know, it was the same person. Now, which one is it? Like how do you deal with the fact that there are these different languages? Even for example, you know, like, you know, at the same dollars, the Rebbe's smiling to the Balabos and stern to the Bochur. You know, like we, we accept these things as all like, "Oh yeah, that's just how it is." But I think that does lead to a certain kind of confusion where it's like, what is the message that I'm getting here? Is the message of like a st- uh, uh, a very, I don't know the word stern, but, um, an unrelenting or uncompromising posture that, that is more in a way old school, or is it the more new school of like open and tolerant and then embracing people where they're at? Uh, it-

52:45 Speaker 4 It's incredible, but what you're really pointing at is it's neither Chesed nor Gevurah. It's just Emes. And what's needed in each moment for each person, and sometimes the same person in different moments. But one doesn't compromise the other. So when the Rebbe is stern to the Bochur and smiling to the Balabos, it's because the Bochur needs this and the Balabos needs that. And so for the Emes demands Chesed here and Gevurah there. You familiar with the fame... I, I, by the way, I, I really, one of my pet peeves is when people talk about a famous sicha or a famous maamer, because the word famous sicha is only designed to make the person who never heard about it feel deficient.

53:28 Speaker 3 That's all right.

53:29 Speaker 4 So, uh, so I'm putting this out there for the whole audience.

53:34 Speaker 3 Yeah.

53:34 Speaker 4 Please stop using the word famous, um, because it's famous to those who read about it, so famous to those who heard the sicha.

53:40 Speaker 3 Right.

53:40 Speaker 4 But there is a sicha from the Rebbe in the early Likkutei Sichos about why one of the synonym of, of kashrus is that you have split hooves, and that is because by nature a person is drawn to be either to the right or to the left, Chesed or Gevurah. But if you're just following what is easy for you, your natural pattern, you're not necessarily serving the Habocher by what he needs.

54:02 Speaker 3 Right.

54:02 Speaker 4 And when Avraham needed to be stern on the, on, on Adam and Chava, then he, Yitzchak said to him, "Avi?" And then he said, you know, "Hinani beni," and I found a, found a beautiful vort once. I can't remember who said it. "In this moment, I am my son." Yitzchak was Gevurah. "In this moment, I am taking on-

54:21 Speaker 3 Oh, that's beautiful

54:21 Speaker 4 ... the characteristic of Gevurah because that's what's needed now." So-

54:25 Speaker 3 It's a beautiful vort

54:26 Speaker 4 ... when you, you need to be able to do both if you're gonna be kosher, because if you're just following the natural pattern, what's easy for you, that then is not an avodah Hashem and it's not Emes. And the Rebbe, if anything, was Emes. And so if the Bochur needs stern, he gets stern. If the Balabos needs a smile, he gets a smile. And if the same person today needs to be urged and tomorrow needs to be supported, then that's what they get, and we need to be able to channel that as parents as well.

54:54 Speaker 3 Yeah. I think that's, to me, that's, that's the best answer to the earlier question of how do you, how do you have empathy without sacrificing values? You know, it, it, it can become a very technical question, which we did kind of get into. Um, maybe, maybe it doesn't need to be, but I think it does end up being technical in many cases. It can be technical, but I think fundamentally, before you get into the technicalities of what to do here, what to do there, my, my feeling is, my sense is, is that the question is: Are you making things easier for you or making things harder for yourself? If you're making things easier for yourself with empathy, then you're probably sliding into-

55:37 Speaker 4 Weakness

55:37 Speaker 3 ... weakness, right? It's, it's easy in many ways, especially in today's culture, to go empathy way, it, to go the way of the empathy. I give my kid what he wants or, okay, maybe that's being a caric- making a caricature, but you know, I, I, I'm very, very into my child's feelings and so on and so forth. That's where everyone wants you to go. That, that's, that's where a lot of nature... You know, that, th- there's, that's the path of least resistance today.

56:00 Speaker 4 It's the culture of the day.

56:02 Speaker 3 Right. Like didn't the Chassidim say once, uh, back in the day that like- Like they had this kind of that whatever they wanted to do, they did the opposite, right? There was a, there was some, some kind of a, uh, some kind of lotion like that where whatever their, their desire was, they, they, they, they davka went up to and broke it because it, it's a tell. If, if, if it's, if it comes, if, if it comes to you easily, then that's, that, that, that's you finding the path of least resistance. But if, i-if what you're... If, if, if empathy or, or the listening to your child or whatever it is that we're talking about comes harder because you're demanding this emes from yourself where, yes, here I have to be stern, and at the same time I have to turn around and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and go pa- you know, hineini b'ni, put myself in my child's shoes and go against what I just said, it's demanding. It's hard. It's hard as heck. But then you know that, I think, then you, you are more assured that you are doing it for the, for the right reasons.

57:04 Speaker 4 You know, it's fascinating that I write for JLI, and most of my writings is Torah studies. And so today, Shiraka Sherman, the shliach here, asked me if I would give the Torah studies class because I helped to draft it. And the actual topic was what we're discussing now. It was about the difference between power and influence, and whether we should teach with power or teach with influence, parent with power, parent with influence, run our office with power or with influence.

57:28 Speaker 3 Uh-huh.

57:29 Speaker 4 And one of the little throwaway lines is that it takes a longer time to accomplish something when you're using the softer approach of influence-

57:38 Speaker 3 Sure

57:38 Speaker 4 ... when you're modeling it. With power, you get your results immediately. But with influence, the results are longer lasting. With power, they last only as long as you can apply the power. When you lose the power because either you ha- don't have power because the other person became powerful enough to resist you, then you haven't made any internal change.

57:57 Speaker 3 Yeah. The, in the which will last longer.

58:02 Speaker 4 Exactly.

58:02 Speaker 3 Um-

58:02 Speaker 4 Chorban Bayis Rishon happened sooner than Chorban Bayis Sheni.

58:05 Speaker 3 Yeah. Look, I, I, I am, I am, just to, just to be honest and be clear, I am very, I'm very against power dynamics in a, in a, in, in, in a family or generational setting. I, I mean, I, I think, I think it is the cause of a lot, a lot of problems. I mean, I, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not advocating for people to use this kind of top-down approach because like you say, it lasts only as long as it lasts, and then the second the s- the, the power flips, which we are seeing today on a generational level, then i-it will backfire on you. So even if you're, even if you are getting what you wanted and you think that that's itself a, a reason to do it that way, like the means justify the ends, it will backfire on you.

58:51 Speaker 4 So using the context we did before, if I insist that my son has to be at the Shabbos table from beginning to end 'cause otherwise he's being disrespectful toward Shabbos, then nine gets you 10 that by the time he's old enough, he won't be keeping Shabbos.

59:04 Speaker 3 Right. Right. No, absolutely. I, I, I-

59:05 Speaker 4 In today's generation where that is an option, one of the things I often tell my children and I reflect on is that if you decided to walk away, like what we call today off the derech, when I was a child, you didn't have a community of people with whom you can do that. There were a few people who did it, and they were really alone. Um, today, it's become a possible thing because there, there's no family that doesn't have one or two examples. There's no class that doesn't have 10 or 15 examples.

59:34 Speaker 3 Right.

59:34 Speaker 4 You can't say no class. My, my, my son tells me that in his class there's only two or three. He's already in sharei dalet in . But, um, be that as it may, you have a chevra with whom to do it.

59:44 Speaker 3 For sure.

59:45 Speaker 4 And so parents have to be aware that-

59:47 Speaker 3 The, the internet also

59:47 Speaker 4 ... and, and this is the same dynamic that historians talk about, that when we moved from the Gemeinde culture in Europe where every, all of the social power was in the hands, concentrated in the hands of the leadership, then you knew that if you g-gave someone a cherem, put someone in the cherem, excommunicated them, they had no choice but to beg to be included again. And then when we came out into emancipation and enlightenment, and Jews found that they are actually welcomed in circles beyond the Jewish, the s- the strict Jewish community, we had to find a new approach because the top-down approach wasn't working. And the same is happening now in our own time because children are more empowered today than ever before. So if ch-

1:00:27 Speaker 3 Yeah

1:00:28 Speaker 4 ... if parents try to overpower children, the children have a lot more power to push back than they ever did.

1:00:33 Speaker 3 Children are more empowered, parents are more disempowered.

1:00:36 Speaker 4 True.

1:00:37 Speaker 3 Yeah. And which one caused which? You know, it's always an age-old question.

1:00:40 Speaker 4 Well, I don't know if it's a parent's disempowering that's causing the children empowerment. I think it has a lot to do with social media-

1:00:46 Speaker 3 Right

1:00:46 Speaker 4 ... access to resources that children never had before that parents would dole out and control.

1:00:52 Speaker 3 Right.

1:00:52 Speaker 4 So.

1:00:53 Speaker 3 No, even on a practical level, you know, once upon a time, a child left a community, the chances of them succeeding financially, materially, whatever, you know, emotionally were much lower. As you, as you just described, they didn't have a community. Um, many paths of success were cut off to them, the w- the few that existed before. Today, that's not true. Very often, it's the reverse. You know, by leaving the community, more paths open to you because your community's restricted. We have some things that are cut off to you and so on. And so, you know, the success and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and being, being, being, being, being successful, of course, how you define success is, is, is, is, is very subjective. But b-being able to stand on your own and, and develop your own, your own, your own ability and your own, your own standing is much more available today. And, and yes, I, I think, I think playing the power game is, is, is fool's gold, absolutely, just on a practical level. Uh, just on a practical level. And also, just think about the idea that we would be talking about power in a family. Like, that itself... And you know, or even in, you know, if, if we're talking on a communal level, the fact that we could even see it through a prism of power of like who gets to tell who what- That means that something is deeply broken. Like-

1:02:11 Speaker 4 So-

1:02:12 Speaker 3 Why are parents-

1:02:13 Speaker 4 I, I would, I would take you back to the old days when the entire dynamic was top-down, and power wasn't seen as a negative.

1:02:19 Speaker 3 Right.

1:02:20 Speaker 4 That's just the way it was. The-- All the power did sit in the hands of the parents, and the children were completely dependent. And so, uh, chil-parents weren't exercising negative power. They were just exercising power. But today, the world has changed, dynamics has changed, that the only way to exercise power is through negative power. And I believe that that's why the Rebbe says that today Yumi Mikareves is better than Smalta Because the Smalta is not innocent, neutral power. It's negative power because you're overpowering someone who has already got some power, as opposed to just, "That's just the model. My children have no power. I have all the power, so therefore I dole it out as I see fit."

1:03:00 Speaker 3 Right. Right. Right. Things do change. They, they... What did I hear once? I heard, I heard that, that was, uh, not, not, not a Lubavitch story. Um, those listening will forgive me, but, uh, there was a mechanic in America right after the war, and there was a question of how to teach Aleph Bet or something. Again, I know this might not go according to Lubavitch, uh, Hashkafa, but it's okay. I think the, the point is a good one. It was Aleph Bet or just in general how to teach, how, you know. So they went to, I think, Rabbi Moshe, and they asked Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, uh, um, you know, what's, what's the-- Oh, what's a mis-what's, what's a mesorah about teaching? And Rabbi Moshe Feinstein answered them, "The, the mesorah is that the, the, the children should, should know what they're being taught. How you teach it to them is not as important as, as them learning what you need them to learn."

1:03:54 Speaker 4 The outcome.

1:03:55 Speaker 3 Right? And so, you know, like, you know, exactly how do we taught it in Europe, how we taught it in the old world-

1:04:02 Speaker 4 I guess there's a model for that also in Lubavitch when the Alter Rebbe told the Hasid who come-- who said, "I'm feeling very egotistical about how much, how hospitable I am."

1:04:12 Speaker 3 Right.

1:04:12 Speaker 4 "And, uh, um, it's not really sincere." And the Al-and the Alter Rebbe replied, "But those who need to eat are eating with an Emes."

1:04:19 Speaker 3 Right. Yeah, yeah. He, he said, "I'm not, I'm not doing the Chesed with an Emes." He says, "But the, but the, the, the poor person who's eating a meal is-

1:04:26 Speaker 4 Is Emes

1:04:26 Speaker 3 ...is eating with an Emes." The only thing I meant about Lubavitch is that I know that Lubavitch is very much-

1:04:30 Speaker 4 Yeah. We're very-

1:04:30 Speaker 3 ...about the Aleph Bet.

1:04:31 Speaker 4 Aleph Bet.

1:04:31 Speaker 3 The Aleph Bet.

1:04:32 Speaker 4 Um, it's Aleph O.

1:04:33 Speaker 3 But, you know, I, I, I, I think that's specific about the Aleph Bet. I think in, you know, if you extrapolate that, that we now have to learn-

1:04:39 Speaker 4 That, that's why I wanted to expand the model to say that the concept-

1:04:42 Speaker 3 Yeah

1:04:42 Speaker 4 ...exists.

1:04:42 Speaker 3 Yes, yes. Yes, okay. So we, we have to get-

1:04:45 Speaker 4 I, I do wanna go back to something that you asked about the Rebbe and share something that I found myself very insightful. There were occasions when the Rebbe did reveal more about himself. He was generally very private about his private life. Uh, the most public person, and yet the most private at the same time. It was not until Mem Kes when the Rebbetzin sistalkus that we ever had the chance to walk into the Rebbe's home. And-

1:05:10 Speaker 3 You were a bachur himself, so you-

1:05:11 Speaker 4 I was a bachur. No, in Aleirtis still. In Mem Kes, I was in shared Dalve Mesiftas still.

1:05:16 Speaker 3 Uh-huh.

1:05:17 Speaker 4 So, um, but he was very private. But there were times that the Rebbe did share some things. So, for example, there's that story that happened. It's in-- It's published in the book by Yehish Matzliach about, uh, about, uh, Rabbi Deitsch. But he tells a story about his uncle, David Deitsch. And I was on shlichus in New Haven and had a very good friendship with David, a relationship. I can't call it a friendship. He's so many years my senior. He liked me because he was good friends with that grandfather we were talking about, my mother's father.

1:05:43 Speaker 3 The pastoy.

1:05:44 Speaker 4 He was good at that, that was lost in the war, and we believe he was alive up at least until the '90s when, when my young nephew was born. Um, but he was good friends with him before the war, so that's why he took a liking to me, and he told me the story himself. So he was out of Hebron in Yid Shvat. I can't remember which year. And the Rebbe was... Yeah, I do remember now. It was, uh, Yid Shvat taf shin chai. And the Rebbe was doing an appeal for Chabad to expand Chabad. And then the Rebbe said that he will reserve the right for-- to-- He will open up the paper that everybody s-passes up, passes forward with the amount that they would pledge, and he reserved the right to tell-- call people out if he decided that they could afford more. And in that situation, the Rebbe said, I... David didn't tell me this, but, uh, in the Anacha, that story, that, that comes out. Rebbe says, "Hagamit's not my teva to call people out." So I said to myself, "My goodness, this is exactly what we're talking about with respect to parenting and following the path of res-least resistance, your natural inclination." It's not the Rebbe's teva to push people into uncomfortable positions. You pledge twenty thousand dollars, I think you can do thirty-five. Well, then, it's not really my nature to push you. But in this case, because of the urgency of the situation, I will do it anyway.

1:07:03 Speaker 4 It's like a powerful insight into the Rebbe saying, "This cause calls for me to go beyond my comfort level." So just to finish that story, he put in three thousand dollars, which at that point, he considered a very generous contribution from his part. And the Rebbe said, "Vos? Send more as I feel, ten times as much." And he didn't know what to do. He went home, he borrowed the money, sent it in right away. It turned out that one of his suppliers had a fire in his warehouse, and there was minor damage to some of the... Well, a lot of the, a lot of the, uh, fabric. David's was a fabric merchant. He sold fabric. So he bought it for pennies on the dollar. He sold it. He made ninety thousand dollars. So of course, he paid back the bank. He took thirty for himself, and then he brought thirty to the Rebbe for another donation. And the Rebbe pa-- gave it back to him, and he didn't tell me this part as far as I remember, but it's in the book by Yehish Matzliach. The Rebbe gave it back to him, and the Rebbe said, "I will be your partner. This should be used to invest in the business to expand it." And that's when he became a wealthy man.

1:08:03 Speaker 3 Huh, how about that?

1:08:04 Speaker 4 So that's the end of the story. But the key that I wanted to point to is that the Rebbe said, "It's not my nature But the cause calls for me to go against my nature. One other time that we heard what the Rebbe said about his nature was in a painful episode with the Sfarim when the Rebbe said, "It's not my inyan to get involved in this type of situation. My inyan is to learn in the Rambam." And so that tells us a lot about the year of yitgatar shnyta yitgatar shnyta aleph. It's not the Rebbe's way of thinking that my job is to take, is to, is to take on the role that we know the Rebbe foremost, the one that's most emblematic of the Rebbe, of being the one who takes on the world.

1:08:43 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:08:43 Speaker 4 He wants to be the scholar behind the door who's sitting and learning Rambam. That's what he wants to be.

1:08:49 Speaker 3 Right.

1:08:50 Speaker 4 There's a fascinating letter that we, uh, have, that we have from the Baba Sali, who writes to the Rebbe in tav shin yud beis. The Baba Sali's already a senior rabbi in Morocco, and I think already then he was in, in Israel. And he writes to the Rebbe and he says, "I can't spend a moment with Torah and tefillah because I'm besieged by people who are coming to talk to me. And my real desire is to come and move to New York and to be by you and to be unknown, anonymous, and I'll be able to spend the rest of my time learning and davening, and I'll be in your company. And I ask you because I see l'maalah that they consider your opinion."

1:09:29 Speaker 3 Hmm.

1:09:29 Speaker 4 "Hem yischashvim bedaaticha." And so you see that the Baba Sali himself wanted to get away from this position, this role that he played, this, this, um, expectation people had of him. That wasn't his nature. And the Rebbe writes back to him saying that since the Ibishtha thrust him into this role, and since he is dependent, people depend upon him, then he really has to accept this mission, the shlichus, and he has to continue doing what he did. And the Baba Sali did remain in Tzfat, right? And he continued servicing his community until his last breath. And so you can see from the Rebbe's words to the Baba Sali about his own way of dealing with his own nature and what, what is his preference and what he felt his mission was. So I thought that it was an interesting insight when you asked about who was the real Rebbe. What is his natural preference? On two occasions, he shared with us what it was.

1:10:22 Speaker 3 Yeah. Not, not only who's the real Rebbe, but, but what do we mean when we say the Rebbe X, you know, the Rebbe this, Rebbe that? What do we mean by that? You know, it- the- we-- Are we conflating different things? Are we, are we choosing what- what's convenient? But yes, I-

1:10:40 Speaker 4 Yeah

1:10:40 Speaker 3 ... you know, it, it, it goes back to that point where the, the Rebbe's responding to, what does it say? That, that the most bottle person in Klal Yisrael is a melech, right? The reason you bow down to the king is because the king has to bow down the most by Shema Yisrael, right? That's halakha, I think. Because the king has to be the most, the biggest epitome of bittul, right?

1:11:00 Speaker 4 Ein kelav av elohei Hashem melekhav.

1:11:02 Speaker 3 Right. And so he has to express bittul more than anybody else, right? Even though you have to be bittul to him, right? And so it's the same idea where, like, the Rebbe will demand a lot from you, but of course, that's a, that's downstream of the Rebbe demanding more of himself.

1:11:17 Speaker 4 Of himself.

1:11:17 Speaker 3 Right. And so ultimately, you know, the, the, whatever, whatever the idea, you know, so like I, at least in my, uh, personally, like one of my heuristics of did the Rebbe say this or not, or did he say it the way you're telling me he said it or not, is, is it making my life easier or not? If it's making my life easier and it sounds other- like might- mightily convenient, yeah, probably not.

1:11:44 Speaker 4 It's similar to the Parsha, I think, the Rebbe Rashab, that you can say a shot in Tanya if it's gonna help somebody in their Avodas Hashem.

1:11:51 Speaker 3 Right.

1:11:51 Speaker 4 Um, he said very clearly you can't make up a shot in tefillah.

1:11:54 Speaker 3 Right.

1:11:54 Speaker 4 I think it's in Kuntress HaTefillah that he says this, that you can't make up a shot in tefillah, which hit me over the head because I do that on Ta- on occasions, and I find it very gishmak, but then I have to pull back from it. But, um, at the risk of, uh, again, detracting our conversation onto a, uh, onto another what might end up being a long conversation, I wanna go back to that thing we talked about earlier. That because of my mo- grandmother's experience in Aish LaTorah from a very young age, I was exposed to the idea, the suggestion that maybe not all people that are painted as bad really are bad. And I want to address that for a minute because I am, my shlichus is as a rabbi in an Ashkenaz shul, and that puts me in touch with other Rabbonim who are not Lubavitch. And I learn a lot from them, and there are a lot of, there are a lot of phenomenal people there that have so much to sell, and I buy. I do. I take from them. And I know I have a lot of friends who would say that that's absolutely asur. You're diluting the, the, um, the, the in- the, the s- the purity of your connection, your ishkaches to the Rebbe. And I-

1:13:05 Speaker 3 You have friends that would say that?

1:13:06 Speaker 4 Yeah, I do.

1:13:07 Speaker 3 Okay.

1:13:07 Speaker 4 But I-

1:13:08 Speaker 3 They... So, 'cause I know people say that they are, that, but like, you know for a fact it's not just a caricature of, of Lubavitch-

1:13:15 Speaker 4 No. No, no. I have friends who would say that. But at the same time, I can tell you that my sense of ashreienu ma toiv chelkeinu of being a Chassid of the Rebbe of Lubavitch is enhanced by my appreciation of what I see in other, fr- my appreciation of other Kreis, and then what I see f- there and what I can learn from them. I do learn from them, and it does enrich my understanding, and I will admit that if you came to my library, you will see some Sfarim that you don't usually see in a Lubavitcher person's library. I have a Nefesh HaChayim, and I learn it. Um, and-

1:13:52 Speaker 3 Appropriate we're learning Shaarei Yichud on it now.

1:13:54 Speaker 4 Yeah. So, uh, you know, I have a Mesilas Yesharim, and I open it, and I learn it, and I actually quote from it sometimes. So a Derech HaChayim. You know, I, I have from the Ramchal. Uh, I, I, I stopped using the Sulam because the Rebbe said to someone in, uh, uh, during Dolich, he offered the Rebbe, he, he asked if the Rebbe could help with publ- with, um, distributing the Sulam through, uh, the Lubavitch network. And the Rebbe said, "No, no, no, Pashte, we have a different approach." So otherwise, I, I had a Sulam in my library. Uh, I learned from all of this, and I feel that my Yiddishkeit is enhanced and enriched by this, but it doesn't in any way compromise. And other, and on the contrary, it strengthens my sense of pride of the ashreienu ma toiv chelkeinu of who I am. And I don't think it's any different from learning Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz or Chasam Sofer.

1:14:50 Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I agree. I agree. I grew up the same way. I grew up the same way, at least my, with my father. Um, well, the fact that I'm the same way is not a ra'aya because I, I, I dabble on a lot of stuff. So it's, uh, you know-

1:15:07 Speaker 4 I learned the Mishnah Berurah.

1:15:08 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:15:09 Speaker 4 And I learned the Aruch HaShulchan.

1:15:10 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:15:10 Speaker 4 I didn't used to learn the Mishnah Berurah, but I became a rabbi in an Ashkenaz shul, and I had to know what the Poskim, I had to know when my psak is only the Alter Rebbe's psak, but for my shul, it needed to be the Mishnah Brurah's psak.

1:15:22 Speaker 3 I mean, uh-

1:15:22 Speaker 4 But-

1:15:22 Speaker 3 We, we, we, we can't, we can't, we-

1:15:24 Speaker 4 I, I, I feel that my understanding of Halakha's enhanced when I, when I look at all of the sources.

1:15:29 Speaker 3 We can tie it back to the earlier conversation, um, in that, in that it, it goes back to talking about, um, are you grounded in reality or you're not? You know, the, the, there was, there was Chinuch a hundred years ago, and there's Chinuch today. There is being a Lubavitcher Hasid in wherever it was in Russia when you were isolated, not just from other Yidden but from, but from the world because of a terrible government. And, and, and there's today. Things change, you know. And, and, like, the, the, the need to, you know, the, the need to st- the need to stay the course the way people were back then when circumstances have changed. You're a rebbe in a shul. May-may-maybe your friends have an issue with the fact that you're a rebbe in that shul. I don't know. I don't need to... I, I don't care to go into that unless you want to. I mean, people have all kinds of opinions about stuff. But, you know, you're a rebbe of a shul. You know, it's a different world. May- a hundred years ago, that probably wouldn't have happened. But, but, you know... But also, it goes back to what we s-said even earlier that-

1:16:32 Speaker 4 No, it did. Reb Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev was a rebbe in a shul that didn't want a Hasid.

1:16:36 Speaker 3 Well, I was gonna say, you know, again, it, it goes back to that narrative choke point where people will say that this, you know, it was nevel and this and that, and like... Yeah, but not, but not really. I mean, there were also many others, there were also many other towns and cities where there, where the Chassidim, where the rebbe was not a Lubavitcher, or where there's a Lubavitcher rebbe who had non-Lubavitcher constituents, and so on and so forth.

1:16:58 Speaker 4 For example, Rabbi Soloveitchik, Yeshivas Ohr, often talks about how his memories of Baslavitch-

1:17:04 Speaker 3 Baslavitch

1:17:05 Speaker 4 ... where his fa- where his father was the rabbi, but his melamed was a Lubavitcher.

1:17:08 Speaker 3 Right. So, like, you know, uh, um, what was it? Dr. Zelikson's father was, was the only Hasid in, uh, Krakow, I think, the only Lubavitcher Hasid, the only Lubavitcher Hasid in Krakow.

1:17:19 Speaker 4 Really?

1:17:19 Speaker 3 Yeah. Uh, and there's a, you know, tell, tells different stories about that. Uh, it, it was, you know... And, and what, what, what was he a Lubavitcher? The Minhagim, and I think possibly it's Tanya, but not even. It wasn't, it wasn't so much about learning Chassidus. It was a minhagim more. You know, there, there was a lot of variety. There was a lot of variety because that's what the world does to us, right? Tzidkas Prizzenei, uh, Tzidkas Prizzenei, right? The, you know, the, the-

1:17:44 Speaker 4 The Chabad Chassidim Baruch Hashem, Chizron L'Bein HaOmaim.

1:17:46 Speaker 3 So we only think of that as Yidden amongst Goyim. But Lahav Dilav Havdalahs, you know, a Lubavitcher living here and a Lubavitcher living there in different circumstances, different communities, is gonna look different.

1:17:58 Speaker 4 It's gonna rub off on us.

1:17:59 Speaker 3 Right. No, and the way you're going to be a Lubavitcher is going to be different than another guy who lives in a different, different place or a different space, a different time. And, and the need to conform to, you know, the Lubavitcher who only learns, has only this on his diet because that's how he did it, because that's how it made sense for him at that time, it's just plain silly. I feel like this preamble or this discussion has been a nice preamble to a conversation that we initially intended on having, which was about your childhood. 'Cause I think we, we've been discussing the different narratives about, uh, the, you know, the Rebbe's approach to Chinuch or the Lubavitch approach to Chinuch. There's a very nice backdrop here that sets us up for the story of, of your Chinuch that, that-

1:18:48 Speaker 4 It's quite the preamble. It took us a little while to get through it.

1:18:51 Speaker 3 Uh, those are the best kind of preambles.

1:18:53 Speaker 4 Fair enough.

1:18:53 Speaker 3 The best kind of pr- best kind of preambles. There's more water here if you'd like.

1:18:58 Speaker 4 Yeah.

1:19:00 Speaker 3 Please.

1:19:01 Speaker 4 Thanks. Okay.

1:19:06 Speaker 3 So, um, you, when you were, when you were a young, a young, a young boy in Boston... Go ahead.

1:19:13 Speaker 4 All right. So my parents got married in Elul of Yud Tes, and they went on shlichus to Boston immediately. And, uh, first my-- they were teaching in the local Lubavitch yeshiva. Eventually, they got involved in the Release Time program, and that evolved into a day school that was under Release Time, so it was called Shalo, known as Shalo House. It still exists in Boston. And that's when I grew up. I was born in Lamed Heis, and I was living in Boston. My parents, their shlichus was the day school, so my father didn't have to work. My parents weren't working on Shabbos. It wasn't the Chabad House model we're accustomed to today. He didn't have a Chabad House or a shul. He opened one in Mem Ches after the Rebbetzin's hisdalkus. He wanted to do s-a new meisad in her name, so he opened a shul. He called it Beis Hamish, and that too continues to exist today. Uh, but up until then, I grew up with my father being home on Shabbos, and I got to see the model of a true Hasid spending Shabbos without any demands on his time 'cause he wasn't expected to lead any services or to lead any farbrengens. And so he would literally come to shul. He would get up in the morning. He would, uh, learn Chassidus, come to shul in time to be after mikvah by, by kedusha. So he heard all the divrei mushe of kedusha, and then he would stay in shul and daven in

1:20:33 Speaker 4 a corner up until two thirty, three or so in the afternoon. And, uh, I would have to wait until he was ready to go home. So on the one hand, looking back, I'm fortunate to have that model in my head, that seer. Um, many times I was playing, and then I would go looking for him, and he'd always find a little corner, and he would-- I would, yeah, I would find him by listening to his very gishmakeh low tone Sing song of the davening, like So that, that's a memory in my mind. Uh, by the time I was old enough to remember, my older brothers were already out of the house.

1:21:17 Speaker 3 You're the youngest?

1:21:18 Speaker 4 I am the youngest. I, I'm not the youngest. I'm right in the middle. We are, can I know, at a family of eight. I have a brother nine years older than me, and a sister nine years younger than me. So I'm the, I'm number five, and I'm right in the middle. Uh, but the two children older than me are sisters, and so they stayed home on Shabbos, and I would go with my father alone. So I was pretty much left to fend for myself while my father was davening. And then we'd go home, and Shabbos to the Shabbos-

1:21:44 Speaker 3 Which, which shul did he daven in?

1:21:46 Speaker 4 So on Shabbos Havdalah, we would make the longer walk to the Lubavitch shul that was in the basement of the Krinsky household, the new Krinsky. Um, and then the other weeks, we would go about half the distance to the Boston Erev shul. So I also have these memories of growing up and hearing the Boston Erev give sermons in English about washing nail water. That always sticks in my mind.

1:22:10 Speaker 3 Washing nail water?

1:22:11 Speaker 4 Negel wasser.

1:22:12 Speaker 3 Oh, negel wasser.

1:22:13 Speaker 4 He gave Chassidish sermons in English to his crowd. Um, he was talking about his zeide, the Balabosta.

1:22:19 Speaker 3 He spoke that way because he was very m-m, like, meduyek or because, like, immigrant translating Yiddish?

1:22:26 Speaker 4 I am a child. He's not an immigrant.

1:22:28 Speaker 3 He was not.

1:22:28 Speaker 4 His father was the immigrant.

1:22:29 Speaker 3 So nail water, I've just never heard that expression. Interesting.

1:22:32 Speaker 4 It, it, that's why it stands out for me.

1:22:33 Speaker 3 Right.

1:22:34 Speaker 4 Um, but he, he would talk in English because that was his crowd.

1:22:38 Speaker 3 Right.

1:22:38 Speaker 4 His crowd were the Bostonian academics, and he was able to keep up with them. So I couldn't tell you what his thought process was 'cause I was a child. But, uh, these are different memories than your average Lubavitcher has. Um, but by the time I turned six-

1:22:53 Speaker 3 And your father would daven Barechis over there at the B- the Boston, uh, B-B-

1:22:58 Speaker 4 At the Boston Erev shul.

1:22:59 Speaker 3 Boston Erev.

1:22:59 Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah. He would daven Barechis, but he wouldn't even start until everybody left for Kiddush. Like, he-- Everybody knew that he sits in the back and he listens, and he's, like, looking at a Sefer, and then they leave for Kiddush, and then he's davening. By the time they come back from Kiddush an hour later, he's maybe in Tikkun Chatzos.

1:23:18 Speaker 3 And what did they think of that? Do, do you know what they thought?

1:23:20 Speaker 4 I don't know. They-- I mean, there were people who liked to mock him, and there were-

1:23:24 Speaker 3 Oh, there were?

1:23:25 Speaker 4 Yeah, because he's different, and that's human nature. And there were a lot of people who had a great deal of respect for him. So it wasn't uncommon for some people to, like, hang out after davening to, like, pick his brains and chat with him. And again, he wasn't in a rush. He wasn't going anywhere because my family's rhythm was that we didn't have Sedar Shabbos until he was ready. And so-

1:23:48 Speaker 3 So what was that, three, four o'clock in the afternoon?

1:23:50 Speaker 4 In the summer, it was as late as three or four. In the winter, it was cl- closer to two or two thirty. Um, but yeah, that was common. And, um-

1:24:00 Speaker 3 So how did you make sense of it?

1:24:02 Speaker 4 For me, growing up, that was the way it was. There wasn't a different way. It-

1:24:07 Speaker 3 I mean, you saw everyone else in shul having Kiddush at twelve thirty.

1:24:10 Speaker 4 Oh, it's very easy when you're on shlichus to separate yourself out from the rest of the community. We are the Lubavitchers.

1:24:16 Speaker 3 And then you go to the Krinsky shul.

1:24:19 Speaker 4 So then we are not just the Lubavitchers. We are the Gurke of Lubavitchers.

1:24:22 Speaker 3 Okay. Okay.

1:24:23 Speaker 4 Right? I mean, this is the real McCoy. This is like a little corner in Boston that is Lubavitch of Lubavitch. I was proud of it, but I was hungry. I'm not gonna pretend that it was all perfect and beautiful. I was hungry, and it was a long time to self entertain while my father's davening. Um, in the summer, my brothers would come back from New York, and they would be with me. So I had some, either some people to play with in shul or someone older that I could walk home with before my father was ready. But, uh, in the winter, it was just me. And, uh, as I got older, I began to-

1:25:00 Speaker 3 Just, just to take a tangent for a second and tie it back to the earlier conversation. If it-- I mean, you're a, you're a rabbi, so you don't have this liberty. But if you-- if, uh, circumstances allowed for it, and you were the type that liked to daven for so long, would you do that to your child today?

1:25:19 Speaker 4 No. So this comes to the next part that I was just about to say that when I was older, let's say eight or nine, I began to develop my own independent thinking, and I started realizing, you know, I don't appreciate needing to wait. Why can't I make Kiddush and have mezainus? And, uh, but that was-- I don't even think it was my father's, um, decision. I think my mother was the one who insisted that we all have to eat as a family, and we respect our father. When he's ready, we start. And so I did resent that, and I had always said, in my mind, I had said, "I am going to be someone who doesn't daven with the minyan." I wanted to emulate my father. I'm gonna daven afterwards, but I'm not gonna keep my family from making Kiddush that late, from making Kiddush. I'll be home by one thirty, latest two. And I always said that if anybody was hungry, I would be okay with them making Kiddush before. And then, you know, it's just not my life because I am a shliach, and I have to daven with the minyan. But whenever I'm not there, I really do take the opportunity to daven properly. Except that so often when I'm away for Shabbos, I'm actually there to speak, so I'm not actually free to just spend the afternoon, uh, davening. I have this great memory from my shver, my father-in-law, Dr. Yitzchak Block. When I first went on shlichus, I was in

1:26:41 Speaker 4 Marina del Rey, California, and we brought him for Shabbos Yitshvat. And you know what? Shabbos morning, he was the hired speaker, but he didn't show up to the Kiddush until two or two thirty. He was davening. And there was, there was no question. He didn't ask, "Well, when am I expected to speak 'cause you're paying me?" Shabbos morning, he was gonna daven, and he didn't show up to make Kiddush until we were almost at dessert. And then he started farbrengen with the Olam. So that is a very strong memory for me of how a, a real Hasid will go to a Chabad house, and even if he's expected to speak, he's not gonna compromise on davening properly. Right? Um-

1:27:22 Speaker 3 So just, uh, just paint a little bit more picture of your father. For some reason now I'm remembering different stories, whether some, um, I don't know, I, I can't even tell you what they were, but I remember hearing about, about, about this Moshe Gurkov in 1770. It seems like he, he was, he was an unusual, he was an unusual bachur.

1:27:41 Speaker 4 As a bachur?

1:27:42 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:27:42 Speaker 4 You mean stories that you heard of him as a bachur?

1:27:44 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:27:46 Speaker 4 His friends speak of him in the highest, with the highest admiration. Um, they remember, and Pinya Kor, for example, would talk about how he would stand by the wall and say Kirshner for hours on end. Um, my mother-

1:28:03 Speaker 3 It was like a throwback oived, is what I remember hearing.

1:28:05 Speaker 4 A very, very big oived, but my father's entire world was his kashrus. It started and ended with the Rebbe. His entire world was Rebbe from beginning to end. And, uh, I could say it's true that we children lost out on having a attentive parent because his first and only interest was making sure that the Rebbe's will was done. But I don't bear any resentment to him for that, because that's something that actually inspired me. So I find when I'm farbrengen today with bachurim, with yungerleit, when I'm farbrengen, I often find myself talking about the themes that I heard from him at the Shabbos table. His kashrus was such a big deal for him.

1:28:52 Speaker 3 You don't resent it today, but did you resent it earlier on?

1:28:54 Speaker 4 No.

1:28:55 Speaker 3 You never resented it?

1:28:55 Speaker 4 I never had resentment for his mesirut nefesh for shlichus. That piece, it, it never translated to, "I resent the shlichus." But I certainly wanted to have more of a present and available father. So I wanna separate out those two streams. It's not to say that I was pretty cool with, you know, being neglected because he was busy doing something.

1:29:19 Speaker 3 So you resented being neglected?

1:29:21 Speaker 4 For sure.

1:29:21 Speaker 3 And today?

1:29:22 Speaker 4 But, you mean, do I still carry that resentment?

1:29:25 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:29:25 Speaker 4 So years and years have passed, and they have been very therapeutic, but it's been a process. My father's pos-- passing for me personally, was a, a very big step in letting go of all that resentment. I came to appreciate that we are all finite, broken vessels. We only do as well as we can. I'm only doing as much as I can. And with the passing of a body, of a guf, and the survival of a neshamah, it helped me uncouple. It helped me uncouple his limitations-

1:30:05 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm

1:30:06 Speaker 4 ... his inabilities, and we did a lot of talking about, you know, how he was raised and the limited resources he had to draw on as a parent because of his youth, and all that is the trauma that's registered in the brain, and separate that stream out for me from the neshamah that was just a flame of fire for the Rebbe. His kashrus to the Rebbe was just absolutely enveloping. It was, it was his entire life.

1:30:35 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:30:35 Speaker 4 To the extent that after Gimmel Tammuz, he just couldn't continue. He checked out of life. He really did.

1:30:40 Speaker 3 Really?

1:30:40 Speaker 4 Yeah. It was a process, uh, but within five to eight years, he just was no longer functional.

1:30:47 Speaker 3 So he deteriorated-

1:30:49 Speaker 4 Yeah

1:30:49 Speaker 3 ... immediately after Gimmel Tammuz?

1:30:50 Speaker 4 Yeah.

1:30:51 Speaker 3 Started deteriorating.

1:30:52 Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah, he did. And he, he never recovered.

1:30:56 Speaker 3 Hmm.

1:30:56 Speaker 4 He never recovered. So hi-his life was so focused on the Rebbe that he couldn't adjust after Gimmel Tammuz. And a lot of what I farbreng about when it comes to Gimmel Tammuz is how we-- what is our post Gimmel Tammuz role, and what it means to be a Hasid post Gimmel Tammuz. For my father, that did not exist.

1:31:18 Speaker 3 Did not exist?

1:31:19 Speaker 4 So I'm clearly the next generation because I bridged the pre and post Gimmel Tammuz. I was twenty-two when, when Gimmel Tammuz, Tish'a b'Av happened. So all of my formative years were with the Rebbe, and then all of my mature adult years and impressions and experiences are post Gimmel Tammuz, so I'm that bridge generation.

1:31:41 Speaker 3 So I wanna get back to that, but le-let's, let's first, let's first cover the story of six years old going away from home.

1:31:48 Speaker 4 Yeah. So my parents already started at, with my older two brothers. My oldest brother left at the age of five. M-my next brother left at the age of six. And I too left at the age of six, and I kinda took it for granted. Like, I know that next year I'm going to be in all the Torah living in my Bubbe's home, and, um-

1:32:08 Speaker 3 Your Bubbe is your, is your-

1:32:10 Speaker 4 My mother's mother

1:32:10 Speaker 3 ... the one that we spoke about earlier?

1:32:12 Speaker 4 Yeah. So she was living in Crown Heights. My father's parents were living in London, England until they moved to Crown Heights. I think it was Mem Beis or Mem Gimel.

1:32:20 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:32:20 Speaker 4 I came to New York in, in Elul, Lamid Chesh, so it's Ishrei Lamid Chesh. Effectively, I was by the Rebbe from Lamid Chesh. And, um, there's only one way to describe me being by the Rebbe at six years old without having a mother and father in town. My grandmother was a grandmother. She's different from my mother, and she didn't walk me to shul, and my older brothers were already, you know, each in their own stream. They didn't take a, a parenting role for their younger brother, so I walked myself to shul and back. And, you know, I, I was really somebody that vulgared. I didn't have a, a home base. I don't recall any friends noticing that and inviting me to their home after school. So after school, I went back to my grandmother's apartment. I was a latchkey child. I'd open the door and wait for my grandmother to come home from work. And then it was her and I until my brothers, my older brothers came back from yeshiva at seven o'clock or whatever it was. Um, so it was at the time, I didn't register it as a difficult time. I, I didn't experience it in a bad way. I missed being home. I definitely missed being home. Every time I left home, it was a traumatic experience. The worst was, of course, the beginning of the year because the summer was behind us, and now it would be an entire year, and I would cry for days missing my parents. And

1:33:46 Speaker 4 then because my parents ran a school, so every time there was a long weekend, they would come to New York. And so I'd see them seven or eight times during the course of the year, during the course of the school year, and then we spent Sukkos as well as Hanukkah and the summer at home. Never went to overnight camps, which I thought was a chance to-

1:34:03 Speaker 3 Your father wouldn't come in for Sukkos?

1:34:05 Speaker 4 So no, he, he would come in for Yom Kippur, and then we would go back with him for Sukkos because there was school during Yom Kippur to Sukkos. There was school during Chol HaMoed, so he would come back for Simchat Torah.

1:34:15 Speaker 3 He would come back for Simchat Torah by himself?

1:34:17 Speaker 4 Yeah. No, no, with all of us. So yeah-

1:34:19 Speaker 3 He'd go back for the first days and come back for Simchat Torah.

1:34:21 Speaker 4 Exactly. Yeah. Um, so but I grew up literally by the Rebbe and learning in Ohel Torah. The chinuch was Al Tarus Hakodesh. And keep in mind that there was a or modern Orthodox day school in Boston.

1:34:39 Speaker 3 Right.

1:34:39 Speaker 4 Maimonides-

1:34:40 Speaker 3 Right

1:34:40 Speaker 4 ... was the name of the school. It still exists. But so my parents had the option of giving me a modern Orthodox chinuch buttressed by a Chassidishe chinuch at home. I don't know how long they would be willing to do that, maybe till eighth grade or ninth grade or tenth grade, but it never even entered their mind.

1:34:57 Speaker 3 This is Rabbi Soloveitchik's school.

1:34:58 Speaker 4 Rabbi Soloveitchik's school. Yeah.

1:34:59 Speaker 3 And he was, he was still around back then, wasn't he?

1:35:01 Speaker 4 He was still around. And my father had a relationship with Soloveitchik. He would talk to him on occasions, and he would learn from him. He'd go to his classes and learn with him, and but he didn't-- he never even crossed his mind or my mother's mind that their children would get any chinuch different from the chinuch Al Tarus Hakodesh in Ohel Torah. And so it was, it was not even a question in my mind as a child. It was a given. You know, my, my brother's ahead of me, and, you know, it wasn't like they made the mistake with my oldest brother and then adjusted course for the next ones. This was how they operated. Now, it wasn't for my sisters. My sisters got to finish eighth grade at home, but then they went away for high school. My younger brothers, there was enough of a core of, of families in Boston to open a Lubavitcher cheder, so they too got to stay in Boston for much longer than me and my two older brothers. But here's a fascinating piece that only happened when my child was six years old. I was talking to my mother on the phone, and it was before my mother had Alzheimer's, and so she was able to talk and discuss it. I wish I could go back now and verify these details because my older brothers have denied that this is true, but my mother told me the story. I said to her, "Mama," I said, "How did you

1:36:17 Speaker 4 send me away from home?" Now that I think back as an adult, I realize it really was a difficult time. I remember walking the streets by myself and looking into other people's homes and seeing- ... the warm lamplight and children jumping on the couches and feeling like I wanted that for myself.

1:36:33 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:36:34 Speaker 4 There was only one classmate in my entire class who ever invited me to their, to his home after school. It was Yossi Halberstam. Um, he just lost his mother to, um... But Yossi's eleven, Langue Yard, and he used to invite me on occasion, but otherwise, I don't think anybody even realized that there is a concept of somebody who doesn't live in Crown Heights, who goes to school in Ohel Torah.

1:36:56 Speaker 3 Right.

1:36:56 Speaker 4 It was such a weird phenomenon. Nobody else did it. There weren't that many Yeshivishim in those days either.

1:37:02 Speaker 3 Right.

1:37:02 Speaker 4 I remember the first yeshivish Yeshivishim was around one table.

1:37:05 Speaker 3 Right.

1:37:05 Speaker 4 So, um, you know, I asked my mother, "How did you do that?" I can't even begin to ma- wrap my mind around sending my son away from home at this age because he's not ready. He's not anywhere near ready. He's a child. He's a little baby. He needs his mother and father. Just can't do it. And funny enough, when I first got married, I said to my wife, "Of course, our children will be out of the house by the time they're six. That's how I was." Only when my son was six, that just, just wasn't an option.

1:37:35 Speaker 3 Right.

1:37:35 Speaker 4 And so I asked my mother, "How did you do that? How did you and Tata do that?" And she says to me, "We didn't make the decision. The Rebbe made this decision." And I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "Every year, we would write into the Rebbe." I, I'm assuming that by Lamas Tes, it was already after the heart attack, so this, this didn't happen in Yechidus.

1:37:58 Speaker 3 Right.

1:37:58 Speaker 4 At that point, it probably happened just through correspondence. And we would give the Rebbe an update where each of our children are, and we would ask, "What, what do we do next year?" And the Rebbe would tell us specifically. So for the girls, he said, "Let them stay home." For the boys, he said, "Send them to Crown Heights." So I said to my mother, and this was the one time that I could tell you that I felt resentment to the Rebbe, the one time in my life, and it lasted until my mother answered the question. I said, "So where was the Rebbe when I was roaming the streets of Crown Heights feeling immature, fee- feeling so homesick?" I still remember the first time I told the story openly. I told it at a farbrengen at five AM in the aisle, and there were six bachur still, still awake. And, and there was one, and, and the next thing I knew, it was published everywhere. So there was, there was one bachur who was just mocking me. "What, what are you sharing a therapy session? Like you're gonna try to make us feel bad for your poor experiences?" But that was my reality. And I said to my mother, "So where was the Rebbe then? He took responsibility. He told me-

1:39:01 Speaker 3 And just, just as an aside, that bachur is dealing with something that-

1:39:04 Speaker 4 Yeah

1:39:04 Speaker 3 ... we don't even wanna know.

1:39:05 Speaker 4 I'm sure.

1:39:06 Speaker 3 I know for that, I know that for a fact. Anyway, go ahead.

1:39:08 Speaker 4 So, um, I, I said, "He told you to send me to L-- to New York, but did he make any provisions for my emotional well-being while I was there?" And, um, at this point, I had already been to Chicago at one point, and Natik was farbrenging, and he was saying how he was just newly immigrant from, immigrated from Russia into Israel, and his father always used to say, "The daf avek geben the kinder tsum Rebbe. We have to give the kids over to the Rebbe." And he wanted to go travel and learn in yeshiva in New York, and his father felt that the age of fourteen is too far to send a child abroad so far. And he prevailed upon his father to write to the Rebbe and ask, and the Rebbe agreed that he should come. And he said, "My father was so happy because I asked the Rebbe, and he said he would take my child."

1:40:04 Speaker 3 Right.

1:40:05 Speaker 4 So he wrapped his mind around sending away his child as I'm sending my child to the Rebbe to raise. And we have stories about how my father came to Crown Heights and how the Rebbe played a fatherly role to my father.

1:40:17 Speaker 3 But that wasn't your experience, though.

1:40:19 Speaker 4 But that was my experience.

1:40:21 Speaker 3 Right.

1:40:21 Speaker 4 So that's why I asked my mother, "So where was the Rebbe playing that fatherly role?"

1:40:26 Speaker 3 Right.

1:40:26 Speaker 4 The Rebbe never even looked at me, not any different than anyone else. The Rebbe d-- I didn't feel like the Rebbe ever noticed me. I was just part of the furniture. I was one of the hundreds and thousands of people there, and yet he took responsibility. He said, "You send him away from home at the age of six, and then he didn't bother?" So my mother said, "He didn't bother? He insisted on regular reports about everything going on in your life, your grades, but also what's going on at home and how are you adjusting. And he got these reports on a regular basis from us."

1:41:02 Speaker 3 Hmm.

1:41:03 Speaker 4 And that blew my mind because I have to acknowledge as an adult that while I was taking up the cause of the little me, who was very homesick at that time, I have to say I don't have any spillover into adulthood that's traumatized by that, which is astounding to me. And how can I explain it? And then I say to myself, if the Rebbe's reading these letters every month, these reports, and he's going to the oil and he's davening for me, and he's giving me brachos, and he's not even giving me any indication that he knows about my situation, but he's taking care of things behind the scenes, that was just powerful to me. I didn't know I had this bond with the Rebbe.

1:41:49 Speaker 3 Hmm.

1:41:49 Speaker 4 Reminds me of that story Yossi Jacobson tells about this person who, can't remember his name. I'm not great with names. Um, he came to the Rebbe and he, and the Rebbe showed him that he had a letter in his drawer written by this person's mother, who was a Satmar woman, and she was diagnosed with cancer, and she had, I think, eight children. And she wrote to the Rebbe saying, "I'm not your Hasid, but I hear great things about you, so I'm not gonna be here much longer. I'm worried about my children. Can you daven for them?" And she wrote their names. And when he saw this, he was the youngest, and he was successful and an adult at this point, and he asked if he can have this. He doesn't have anything from his mother with her handwriting. And the Rebbe said he can't have it. He says, "Because I can't go to Kol Nidre before I read this letter and daven for them." And he never knew that the Rebbe's davening for a family that is not even among his Hasidim.

1:42:41 Speaker 3 Right.

1:42:41 Speaker 4 And here I felt to myself, this is me, the Rebbe's looking after me. The story has a follow-up, and I can't tell you the name of the person it followed up with because he doesn't want me to, but-

1:42:52 Speaker 3 It's okay

1:42:52 Speaker 4 ... I was in the aisle a little while later, quite a few years later, and it was an empty time. It was very empty at the aisle. It was like early Elul, and it was about Mincha time, and it was, it was actually quite empty at the aisle. And I, and I walked over to watch the video after I came out of the aisle, and I'm standing there and watching, and in my mind, suddenly I start thinking, "You know, this is a very familiar scene to me," because as a child, I was in New York, and the was first, and it was first started by the Rebbe. And that's when the Rebbe invited the children to always daven up front next to him and sit next to him by farbrengen. So I spent the years from till my bar mitzvah in them. Hey, my muk and kavua by farbrengen was up on the sht-- on the bimah, first at the Rebbe's left, later to the Rebbe's right. And so this scene is, to me, extremely familiar, and it would have been foreign to me if my parents hadn't had the mesirus nefesh to send me away. And I was suddenly flooded with a stream of gratitude towards them. Incredible, intense gratitude because otherwise, this would have been something I've only... It would have n- wouldn't have been Girsah d'Yankeh. So it would have been something I learned as a, quote-unquote, "adult." As a teenager, I'd come for Mesifta. Uh, as so many of my other

1:44:09 Speaker 4 friends came from Shlichus to Mesifta or later to Zal even. And I walk out, and I see someone, a chaver I haven't seen, I hadn't seen in years. Later, he told me that he had not seen me since before Gimmel Tammuz. And he says to me, "Oh, Laser, what's going on? What's new?" And for some crazy reason, I just shared that with him. "What's new? Right now, I'm feeling so indebted to my parents for having the mesirus nefesh of sending me away at such a young age." He looks at me. He starts crying. Tears start falling down from his eyes, down his cheeks. He says nothing. I sense that something deep is happening. I go over, and I give him a hug. He turns around, and he just makes a beeline for the door to the aisle. And that was the end of that. Oh, oh, I, I did share with him that I asked my mother how she had the, the courage-

1:45:06 Speaker 3 Right

1:45:06 Speaker 4 ... the chutzpah to send me away, and that it was the Rebbe's, uh, it was the Rebbe's advice, how grateful I am now. I saw him a few months later by the Kinus. Funny, he says he hasn't seen me for years, and then I saw him twice in that same year. And he says to me, "That story has to be publicized." And I thought, "What? Publicize the story? It's like a detail of my own life. It's a private story. I don't wanna tell it."

1:45:27 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:45:27 Speaker 4 Uh, until it ended up, I told it at a farbrengen, and then it got published anyway. Um, so at some point, because it was well-known at that point, I was asked by the Kinus, Kinus Teddi Hashluchim if I would tell the story to, to the children.

1:45:41 Speaker 3 Did he tell you why he was so moved by it?

1:45:43 Speaker 4 At this point, he did. So the Kinus Teddi Hashluchim wanted it because they felt that there was a message here that we don't see the Rebbe today, and that doesn't mean that we don't have an intimate bond, that he's caring for us and davening for us and protecting us with his brachos. And I said, "You know, the story is gonna be a lot more powerful if I could find out why this Shliach was crying." So I called him, and I asked him if I could tell-- if he could share with me why he was so emotional about it, and if I would be allowed to share that with the boys. It turned out that they changed their plans, and I never ended up speaking to the, to, to the Guinness. But because they asked, he, uh, he agreed to tell me his part of the story, but on the condition that I never divulged his name, but he gave me permission to tell the story. So he lives very far, like In the world. And it was his oldest child who was ready for ninth grade, and they knew that they couldn't continue their education where they lived. And he's extremely emotional. He always was. And so-

1:46:46 Speaker 3 With the child?

1:46:48 Speaker 4 My friend.

1:46:48 Speaker 3 Your friend.

1:46:49 Speaker 4 Yeah. He always was. He said to me, "You saw me on a Monday. The sh... I, I flew with my daughter to Chicago on Sunday, and I dropped her off. The Shabbos was our last Shabbos at home as a family, and it struck me this is the last time our family will all be living at home. From now on, they'll be visiting. And the entire Shabbos, I was in a very heightened emotional state. I was so saddened by the fact that this poor child, that our entire family's dynamic is going to change, and it's just gonna continue as the next kids get older. And it bothered me. I was so sad. And then I said goodbye to my daughter, and I was distraught. And my return flight is Tuesday, and I was gonna stay in Chicago till my return flight. And I felt so bereft, and I thought, 'Why don't I go to the oil on Monday, and I'll go back to Chicago and catch my flight on Tuesday? I'll pour my heart out to the Rebbe.' And then I run into you, and I think to myself, I haven't seen him since before Gimmel Tammuz and him coming to the Rebbe. So asked me, 'What's new?' And I gave him that message that number one, the Rebbe tells my parents to send the children away for Chinuch. And number two, the end result is that I am so indebted with gratitude to my parents for having done what was so painful to them." 'Cause

1:48:12 Speaker 4 at that point, I began to realize that as painful as it was to me, so much more painful for them.

1:48:17 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:48:17 Speaker 4 And they undertook that s- for my benefit, and look what I've gained from it. And yes, it's the story about how this is a familiar scene to me. The Farbrengen is a familiar scene, but it's not just about the Farbrengen. It's about all those years of Chinuch by the Rebbe. I was literally by the Rebbe's feet. Literally, I sat by the Rebbe's feet, right? At the Farbrengens. He said that was to him like it blew his circuits, and he ran straight to the oil. And he said to me, "That was the most intense oil visit that he's ever had." He said he spent the entire time crying and laughing, crying for, of course, his child being away from home and thanking the Rebbe for the incredible privilege of raising him up to that point where that sacrifice is demanded of him and where he's finding the strength as hard as it is to make it because in the long term, it's for his child's best interest, in his child's best interest.

1:49:16 Speaker 3 Mm-hmm.

1:49:16 Speaker 4 So that's my six-year-old going away from home story.

1:49:22 Speaker 3 Yeah. It's a, it's a heavy one. It's a heavy one. Um, yeah, that... Yeah. So, y- you know, this is a... Tr- trying to see how, how, how to keep it within the confines of our conversation 'cause I could take it off, I could take it in a million ways. But, um, yeah. You know, the, the, the idea of, the idea of, you know, it's, it's on the Rebbe's plates is, is, is, is, uh, is, is, is a, is a, is a term that is brought up very often when it comes to shluchim sending their kids away. And I think it's very often understood that, you know, the Rebbe will ensure that it, it goes without a hitch and everything works out, you know, and everything kind of... And, and, and I, and I have for a long time felt that that's not the correct understanding. The correct understanding in my view is that nothing's guaranteed. Um, the Rebbe is not guaranteeing anything to you, and I'm not sure that anything was guaranteed to him. You know, the Rebbe's talking about of sending out his, his, his shluchim on shlichas. If anything was guaranteed to him, why is it ? Right? Um, you know, it... The, the whole point is that you, you, you, you do what's right even though you don't know how it's gonna end up because it's right, because that's what you think God wants, right? And, and, and so the idea that it's after, after Rebbe's plates and therefore everything is

1:51:23 Speaker 3 gonna work out exactly how you think it should, A, what do you know about what is good and not good? But even without that, who said it's guaranteed? Even if you're right about what's good, who said anything's guaranteed? So what does it mean after Rebbe's plates is? In my view, it means that the Rebbe is accepting the burden of, of, of what this is. He's accepting the burden of, of, of it, of the, of this decision. Um, that's how I, that's how I've always understood the story. And, you know, your story of course has in a way, uh, a happy ending to it in the sense that you are able to look at those years as years that you were by the Rebbe. Um, of course, especially younger shluchim and younger shluchas kids don't have that kind of, uh, you know, they, they can't, they can't see that obvious value. To be, to be quite frank with you, you know, as I get older, I don't see so... I, I, I don't believe I have much, if any, resentment about my going away from home, which was also at a quite young age.

1:52:36 Speaker 4 How old were you, and where did you go?

1:52:38 Speaker 3 I was, I was eight when I started. But I didn't, I didn't go off right away for so long. I st- it kind of was gradual. It was a couple weeks and a couple months at a time. And it was, you know, but it was, on the other hand, it was to Australia, which was a 10-hour flight.

1:52:52 Speaker 4 Right.

1:52:54 Speaker 3 You know, and, you know, my mother might not be thrilled with me sharing this, but I think I can. You know, a, a few, a few weeks ago-

1:53:02 Speaker 4 Well, you put out so many podcasts, let's hope she doesn't listen to every single one of them.

1:53:05 Speaker 3 No, she does. It's okay. But, uh, you know, a, a few, uh, you know, a, a while ago, my wife and I went away for a few days and, um, my mother came to watch our kids. And-

1:53:17 Speaker 4 And you said, "Do me a favor. I don't want them to end up in Australia before I come back."

1:53:20 Speaker 3 No, no, no, but I, I was not concerned about that at all. My mother was aft- afterwards, she's like, you know, "Having spent time with your young kids, I don't know how we sent you away when you were so young." And, you know, like, uh, first of all, the, the realization you have as you get older is that as hard as it was for you, it was harder for your parents.

1:53:46 Speaker 4 Mm-hmm.

1:53:47 Speaker 3 Now, to be careful with that, that therefore doesn't mean that whatever, if someone is struggling with it s- to this, you know, even as they get older or, you know, it's not your pro... you know, worry about your parents. No, no, it was done to you. You were sent away, so if it's hurting you, it's hurting you. And, and I, you know, I, I think you have to, you have to figure it out. It's-

1:54:08 Speaker 4 And on top of that, it was a choice made by the parents-

1:54:11 Speaker 3 Not by you

1:54:11 Speaker 4 ... that fell, that spilled over onto the child.

1:54:14 Speaker 3 Correct. It's, it wasn't your choice, and so I'm not at all suggesting. But for me personally, I don't feel like, I, I don't, it, it's not something that bothers me directly. I, I see mostly, if not, if not entirely, I haven't, I haven't fully analyzed it or ha- put or subjected myself to scrutiny by a professional on this topic. But, you know, the way I see it is that I see almost all good came out of it. Like, there was a lot of good that came from the world I was exposed to and the lessons that I learned, and I'm fine with it. But, um, but, but first of all, I, I know that, I know that there's, you know, I think even in that case, I think there's a scar. I think there's a scar. Um, and I think, and I know that for a lot of people, they're, they didn't have, they, they don't look at it with that kind of reconciliation. There's a scar that bothers them. And I think for parents, and I think this is where it's harder for the parents, I don't think they can ever, I don't think they can ever move past that scarring. Because a child ultimately can say, "You know what?" Like you said, uh, or you s- you know, you said that or something else. But a child can say, "You know what? It was done to me. I'm not gonna do it to my child. Like, I will, I will find meaning in

1:55:34 Speaker 3 my life in the fact that I don't do what was done to me." The parent can't do that.

1:55:40 Speaker 4 I find that whenever I take that approach, I, I'm going to, the motivation is gonna be to be different from what was done to me. Eventually, I slip back into what was done to me.

1:55:48 Speaker 3 Of course. Of course, because-

1:55:49 Speaker 4 Because that's not a constructive motivation.

1:55:51 Speaker 3 No, of course.

1:55:52 Speaker 4 That's-

1:55:52 Speaker 3 Of course. But I'm saying that peop- that a young person ha- a child has the ability to write a new course.

1:55:58 Speaker 4 Yeah.

1:55:59 Speaker 3 Whether with their, with their child or with themselves, the parent can never take back that decision. It's, like, the same way that they were the ones who sent you off, they're als- they also, they also now can never, it's now out of their hands, right? It was in their hands then, but now it's in your hands, right? And so in a way, you know, going back to the, the power thing, like, you know, at the time, yeah, they were able to, they were able to choose what was gonna happen to you, but now you choose. And so the parent can never fully, it's not in their hands to forgive themselves, right? But in a way, like, who are they s- like, who sh- like, who are they supposed to go to, to the rebbe? Like, and who's the rebbe gonna go to? Right? This is, this is, this is a, this is a painful part, a, a, a, a, a very heavy part, and I think ap- I think the appropriate word is a painful part of, of going on shlichas and, and, and, or doing this kind of thing where, where, where it will demand these kind of sacrifices, these kind of sacrifices. And, you know, so, you know, you, you tell this story, and you tell the story. And so when I, when I hear this, like, the rebbe was involved, I don't see so much that the rebbe solved it. I, I can't tell you how you should feel, but I'm saying

1:57:13 Speaker 3 how the story translates for me. 'Cause I, I don't have that I got to be in Crown Heights. But the fact that the rebbe cared about it, to me just says this was a weighty subject. This was a heavy subject. It was not taken for granted. It was not taken for granted. This is a cost of shlichas. You know, people get, have gotten very upset at me for even suggesting that shlichas has a cost. And I don't really care 'cause I think that's nonsense. I think obviously it has a cost. Anything good in this world has a cost.

1:57:47 Speaker 4 It has a cost to the shliach himself.

1:57:49 Speaker 3 Right.

1:57:49 Speaker 4 Today, it's not as acute, but before Gimel Tammuz, it meant the shliach had to give up on being by the rebbe by farbrengen. The shliach had to give up on being by the rebbe by davening, by dollars, by lekach, right? You had to give up your whole life. And the rebbe would say, for example, often b'negeha to Taluka Don't be a smart boy and go to Taluchas in East Flatbush to come back and catch the Fabrengen. Dafka wants you to miss the Fabrengen and go to East Side and go far and be from some Eretz and elsewhere. It comes at a cost because it's something valuable, and valuable things come at a cost.

1:58:27 Speaker 3 Yeah.

1:58:27 Speaker 4 And one of the very painful costs is that we have to send our children away. And it's like you said, as painful as it was for me as a child, I came to realize as an adult how painful it was for my father. You know, I ran into someone yesterday here in this community, Friday actually, and I told him that I discovered as an adult that his father was my father's Mashpia, which blew my mind because my father is a Russian Bachar who always had this sense of like, "We Russian Bachar are the real Lubavitchers, and the Americans are like the fake version of it." But this was not just a, a, um-

1:59:05 Speaker 3 His father was your father's Mashpia?

1:59:07 Speaker 4 Yeah, and his fa- his grandfather was my father's Mashpia. His grandfather was not a born Lubavitcher. I don't even know if he was always from, maybe he was. But he was a total Bostonian, and, um, the last person I would have thought would have been my father's Mashpia. So the fact that he was blew my mind when he told me, his grandfather told me years ago, his grandfather passed away since, that he was my father's Mashpia. Then he told me one thing that my father often complained about to him, and that was he didn't know if he did the right thing by sending his children away. How about that? That was well after my mother told me that, that, you know, we often hear about how, uh, emunah comes more easily to women than to men, right? My mother expressed no reservations as an adult about whether she did the right thing. My father didn't share it with his children, but he shared it with his Mashpia.

2:00:01 Speaker 3 How about that?

2:00:02 Speaker 4 And he often wondered if he did the right thing. And there I said it never crossed their mind to send me to Maimonides. That's how he presented it to us.

2:00:09 Speaker 3 And it wasn't like, I don't, I don't know, any of your siblings, like, took it out on your parents and they were like cha- like, like in a way where you could see obvious detrimental effects?

2:00:17 Speaker 4 Very fortunate we are that that particular aspect of our, of, of our childhood, of the way our parents parented, none of us took it out. None of us resented it. Um, and we all turned out well-balanced despite being, not having the benefit of a mother and father during these very formative and difficult years.

2:00:37 Speaker 3 No, my point is, though, that your father was not responding to, like, my kid ended up in a, in the wrong way, and now I'm wondering if I'm at fault.

2:00:45 Speaker 4 Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah.

2:00:46 Speaker 3 He, he-

2:00:46 Speaker 4 That wasn't it. No

2:00:47 Speaker 3 ... he was simply-

2:00:48 Speaker 4 It was while we were still children and we were away from home.

2:00:50 Speaker 3 'Cause at the end of the day, he's human.

2:00:53 Speaker 4 Yeah.

2:00:54 Speaker 3 It is.

2:00:54 Speaker 4 So-

2:00:55 Speaker 3 And, and-

2:00:55 Speaker 4 It, it, that, I'm just bringing that up to demonstrate the painful, the pain that it caused, the, the cost. And like we said earlier, something valuable has to come at a cost. So you were-

2:01:07 Speaker 3 The pain, the pain-

2:01:07 Speaker 4 You're wrestling with how to process my story, and, and I grant you that each person who listens to my story has to process it their way. And I'm not telling the story because I want to impose my experience onto other people and say, "This is the perspective you need to take," because your story's yours and my story's mine. I share the story on your podcast because I'm hoping that it could be beneficial to people to hear that story and take a different view, consider it, and see if it fits.

2:01:38 Speaker 3 It, it definitely will. That's not a question. It de- it definitely will. It definitely will. The, the, the very fact that, that we're discussing it will already have benefit because this is a subject that I know, uh, from my own, my, my, my own family experience, but I, you know, I'm not just projecting my own family experience 'cause I know for a fact other families have similar things, either because they've told me or I've observed it. I know. I can, I can testify to it in a court of law that there is, this is a subject of immense lingering pain. And even families that have reconciled, where the parents are no-- the children are no longer, are no longer angry at their parents, and they've forgiven them, whatever that means about it. Or maybe some families where the kids didn't feel like they had to forgive their parents. Whatever the case was, this is a subject that very often when it comes up in conversation, it is, it, it, it, it just dies because it's too painful to get to. Okay? I, I heard from, I, I've heard from so many people. I heard once from someone, this is a family dedicated on, to shlichus to the extent that I think almost all their children, if not all their children, went on shlichus when they grew up. Okay? Um, wonderful, wonderful people. And I heard from one of the children who is older already today, and she herself is on shlichus, okay, in the same

2:03:12 Speaker 3 city as her parents. So it doesn't seem much resentment going on over there. And she said to me that whenever the subject-- And she went away from home an hour drive away, which is close enough that she was back for every Shabbos. So you could say, you know, an hour away in emergency or you could come back home, you're coming home once a week, wasn't it? Nevertheless, whenever the subject would come up, her mother would walk off, lock herself up in the d- in her room and cry.

2:03:46 Speaker 4 Her mother did.

2:03:47 Speaker 3 Her mother would walk away from the conversation, lock herself up in her room, and cry.

2:03:51 Speaker 4 And how about the daughter?

2:03:53 Speaker 3 I didn't ask.

2:03:54 Speaker 4 Hmm.

2:03:54 Speaker 3 I, I didn't ask. I didn't ask.

2:03:59 Speaker 4 Wow. So I wanna offer advice to any shliach who's listening, and that is, you just mentioned you're an hour away. You could be there in an emergency. Make a point. If you're an hour, if you're within driving distance, make a point of dropping in and visiting. We, one of my children were in, was in yeshiva one day, and he called me and he said, "Tatty, can I come home?" And I said, "Sure, but why? What's going on?" And he just said, "I just feel like I, I'm, I'm spinning my wheels in yeshiva and, and I just wanna come home." So I said, "The answer off the top is yes. Do you wanna discuss what's going on?" And after a half an hour discussion, he decided that he wants to stay in yeshiva. I hung up the phone, I went over to my wife, and I said, "I'm getting in the car, I'm driving two hours to Toronto, and I'm just going to visit. And I'm going to take him out. It's gonna..." Um, it was eight o'clock. I was gonna get there at 10:00. "We're gonna go out for a drive. We're gonna see if there's any open stores. We'll go and buy treats, and I'll open the question again. Do you wanna come home?" He-- This made such an impression on him. He's not a very extroverted, uh, uh, extroverted, yes, but not someone who communicates his feelings very often. This made such an impression that he still brings it up. It made so

2:05:19 Speaker 4 much... It was, it, it meant so much to him, and it was a big part in his ability to feel like he could continue to stay in yeshiva.

2:05:29 Speaker 5 Hmm. Hmm.

2:05:30 Speaker 4 So my advice to parents is do that. Go. Um, go out of your way, take a day off, and go and visit because it's critical.

2:05:40 Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah, so there was one more topic that I know you originally res- you originally suggested we discuss. I know we've already kind of, uh, we've, we've ... This has been a very lengthy preamble. I don't know if you want to, uh, if you wanna go there or if you, uh, how, how much you wanna go there, but you wanted to discuss your, your, your idea of post-Gimel Tammuz Lubavitch.

2:06:04 Speaker 4 So I don't know when this podcast is gonna play, but we're sitting literally in the week of Gimel Tammuz. I feel like we have to go there.

2:06:10 Speaker 5 Possibly before.

2:06:11 Speaker 4 Uh-

2:06:11 Speaker 5 Possibly might go out before.

2:06:13 Speaker 4 We'll see when it does. So I was listening to-- I was watching, actually listening to a pod- podcast you were doing with someone, and you had asked them, you know, "What is the plan? Like, what was the idea? Why the hishtalsvus? And Shluchim's not here, and it's gonna be 32 years. It strikes me that this is lev shana. Um, what is the plan?" And when I go to communities for Gimel Tammuz, I address this very issue, and to me, it seems fairly obvious. But again, it's my, it's my theory, it's my impression, and I feel like this was not supposed to be the plan. If I follow all the things that the Rebbe says during my youth and as I grew older and, uh, read the nachas from before, it was not the Rebbe's plan that Moshiach wouldn't come before his own hishtalsvus. Of course, he was expecting Moshiach to come every day. Moshiach

2:09:56 Speaker 5 But you said that took you some time to realize this. I remember you told me on the phone that i-it was, this was not an automatic recognition that-

2:10:18 Speaker 4 I'll tell you in a moment why it took me some time to realize this. Um, but looking back, you see how the Rebbe told Shluchim, "I'm not going to pull the strings from here and tell you what to do."

2:10:28 Speaker 5 Right.

2:10:28 Speaker 4 "You have to figure it out al assar, and you have to advise with yedidim mevinim al assar."

2:10:33 Speaker 5 Especially as time went on, right? The, the-

2:10:35 Speaker 4 Even in the beginning-

2:10:35 Speaker 5 Even in the beginning-

2:10:35 Speaker 4 ... the Rebbe said to Moshe Feller, "I can't tell you from here what to do. When you get there, you'll understand." He told, uh, Gershon Mendel Garelik, he said, "Wie lange will ich dir auf dem rücken auf der hand? How long do I have to carry you on the ar- on my arms? Think with Chabad, and you'll be mechaven. You'll figure out what I want you to do. You don't have to ask me every detail. I want you to figure it out."

2:10:55 Speaker 5 Mm-hmm.

2:10:55 Speaker 4 Um, in Mem Dalet, I think it was Caf Av, the Rebbe said, "A real shliach is not just k'mo saidim ve'shaleach, that he has no skin in the game and the Rebbe is working through him." But that a real Shliach means that he's taking ownership. He put on tefillin with somebody today, it's his problem how is that person gonna put on tefillin tomorrow, and not say, "If the Rebbe wants him to put on tefillin, then he and I are gonna run into each other and we'll put on tefillin."

2:11:19 Speaker 5 Right.

2:11:20 Speaker 4 So the Rebbe's entire model is to say his kasherus doesn't mean being with me. His kasherus means being far and still being like me, and that is the deepest form of his kasherus that exists because that means that I'm really with you all the time, in all stages, wherever you are. The Rebbe's final ma'amar, the Vayatzetz have a ma'amar, and the Rebbe says, you know, when you are in a state where you're feeling you're etzem hanefesh begilui because you're in a state of mesirat nefesh like in the Soviet Union as we discussed early on in our discussions, you know, there I can see that, you know, this is having an influence on you. But I wanna see how you are when you are in a state of luxury and relaxed, that everything's okay. Are you still the same person there? Because if you are, then you are going to contribute something to Moshe that Moshe doesn't have on his own, right?

2:12:11 Speaker 5 Right.

2:12:12 Speaker 4 And yes, the Rebbe then concludes the ma'amar saying that, "Don't you think that you have contributed this because the Rebbe couldn't... Moshe didn't have it, but that Moshe empowered you to be able to contribute it. But you're right that without it being you, Moshe couldn't have created somebody who's empowered. You had to be there, but Moshe empowered you to, to give back." Chaf Ches Sivin, mem tes, the Rebbe explained at length. Uh, Moshe comes up l'Shom to, to Har Sinai. He sees the Aibishter writing the Torah, and the Aibishter says, "HaYom l'choli azrini. You should have helped me." Help the Aibishter? The Rebbe's saying, "I need help." What kind of help does the Rebbe need? The Rebbe explained once when it came to the Moshiach Sefer Torah, the Rebbe could have had it written on his own expense, but he wanted to include the Chassidim in it. I need to have people who can demonstrate that when you're outside and you're in a state of tachat and you still want to be what I am, you're still connected with me. That's the deepest type of connection we have. And I feel that the Rebbe kept trying to establish that malchus concept, that the world below, the tachat world that is at a distance from the king should be connected with Elokus, with the Aibishter. And because of our hiskasherus, we were not able to, like, accept that. We, we still kept thinking the Rebbe's doing all the work just through me. Put me wherever you

2:13:41 Speaker 4 want and that's my state, that's my place, work through me. As opposed to, I am at a distance, but at that place of distance, I am yours because I carry you with me wherever I am.

2:13:54 Speaker 5 What does distance mean?

2:13:56 Speaker 4 Distance geographically, but I think that what happened is we, because we didn't live up to that call, Gimel Tammuz happened, and now that distance is a distance of conceptual distance.

2:14:11 Speaker 5 Is it just conceptual? Because if you, if you're using the language of Chassidus, which I agree with, they... I mean, I agree that, I agree with your analysis that malchus is meracheik or berichuk. Richuk, uh, if we're talking in spiritual terms, is never going to be just proximity or even just circumstance. It's going to be, uh, and not, not even just conceptual, it's going to be like richuk hamaylo almost. Like, there has to be a, a-

2:14:38 Speaker 4 You're at a lower level.

2:14:39 Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah.

2:14:40 Speaker 4 I think if we look around the world today and we see we don't have that quality. Even the one that I remember seeing my father davening, Baba, I did like that. That's not your run-of-the-mill Chassid, right? And maybe it was back in, in Shlomin. Maybe it was back in Netre-

2:14:56 Speaker 5 I mean, you're not talking about the world. I'm talking about the connection that the Chassid has to the Rebbe, right? Like, when we say that the Chassid is berichuk from the Rebbe, like, what do we mean by that? We, we get very quickly that, that even though he's br- even though he's berichuk, he has to have a connection.

2:15:10 Speaker 4 Right.

2:15:11 Speaker 5 But before we get to the connection, uh, you know-

2:15:13 Speaker 4 What does it mean to be berichuk?

2:15:14 Speaker 5 A lot of times in Chassidus we, we, we get to the answer, I think, a little bit too quickly before we let the question settle in.

2:15:19 Speaker 4 Before we let the question settle in.

2:15:20 Speaker 5 Or-

2:15:20 Speaker 4 So let me describe what I mean berichuk.

2:15:22 Speaker 5 Right.

2:15:22 Speaker 4 Berichuk means I live in a place where I've never seen the Rebbe. Um, everything around me tells me that Mashiach is not even a distant dream on the horizon. Life has become so drastically different from the way it was when I lived in the Rebbe's Koiser, and the interests of the people around me are so grub compared to the way they were before.

2:15:51 Speaker 5 What about me? Is there int- are there internal doubts?

2:15:53 Speaker 4 And therefore, that's me, and I begin to doubt is Mashiach coming.

2:15:57 Speaker 5 Mm.

2:15:58 Speaker 4 And within this space, because it's 32 years, I have to say for myself that f- you asked me why it took me so long to realize this, because the first 10 years after Gimel Tammuz I was in trauma. Only now do I realize this.

2:16:10 Speaker 5 Like, like your father.

2:16:11 Speaker 4 Not anywhere like that.

2:16:12 Speaker 5 Well, well, not-

2:16:13 Speaker 4 I was-

2:16:13 Speaker 5 Okay

2:16:14 Speaker 4 ... I, I, I was ignoring the... I can't say I was ignoring the loss because the loss was acute. But I was focusing, as we were saying earlier, the Lubavitch mentality from the Soviet Union. The way to respond to the loss of the Rebbe on Gimel Tammuz is to bear down and bring Mashiach.

2:16:30 Speaker 5 Build another Chabad house.

2:16:32 Speaker 4 Build another Chabad house, make another pull-up.

2:16:33 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:16:33 Speaker 4 Keep going. D- don't stop to take a breath, keep going. But then as we got to 20 years and to 30 years, that stamina, how long do you keep it going?

2:16:44 Speaker 5 Right.

2:16:44 Speaker 4 And you feel like it's running out. And there you're at a distance.

2:16:49 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:16:50 Speaker 4 And there that message of Tav Shin Nun, the hechs that Zeit for Mashiach is at a distance. It feels so far. It feels so far away. It feels so distant. That heightened scent of antici- sense of anticipation that existed in Tav Shin Nun, the Nalis and Beis- Is 32 years old, now it's 34 years old, right? From Nun Beis. Um, you're at a distance. But this is the Taachtain SheBeTaachtain that needs to be turned into a dira. This is the test of Malchus. I feel like the message of Chaf Ches-

2:17:25 Speaker 5 So how did you, how did you switch?

2:17:28 Speaker 4 I think it was slowly coming to realize, putting pieces together. I feel like the message of Chaf Ches Nis and Taf Shin Nun Alef, that Ichah Tana Al Taf Sichah B'Kanton-

2:17:40 Speaker 5 Were you there?

2:17:41 Speaker 4 No, I actually missed the Sicha. I came running to 770 afterwards, and I spent the entire night like Homum Keram-

2:17:49 Speaker 5 Oh, you went for night.

2:17:49 Speaker 4 I'm thunderstruck. Yeah.

2:17:50 Speaker 5 You just, you went for the Ma'ariv.

2:17:51 Speaker 4 Yeah.

2:17:51 Speaker 5 You weren't there for Ma'ariv.

2:17:52 Speaker 4 I wasn't there for Ma'ariv. And the Sicha played all night long in 770 over and over again on a recording.

2:17:58 Speaker 5 They played a recording, really?

2:17:59 Speaker 4 They played it on a loop.

2:18:00 Speaker 5 An audio, not a video.

2:18:01 Speaker 4 Yeah, audio, yeah. And, uh, I, I, I couldn't put it together. I didn't know what to make of it. There was an initiative that came out that night. We all have to sign a paper that we're Mekabel the Rebbe as our Melech, it should be Kabbalas HaMalchus LeMelech HaMashiach. And, um, it took me till, like, four in the morning to try to sift through my feelings until I decided that I would sign, and I did sign. And it had an inspiration that lasted three weeks. It was fleeting. After that, I became the same person I was before.

2:18:30 Speaker 5 Do you think that that was what the Rebbe wanted?

2:18:31 Speaker 4 No. Looking back, I realize that the Rebbe was saying exactly this. "You're screaming we want Mashiach now because we told you to scream, not because you really feel it. Not because you really feel that you need it, you want it.

2:18:47 Speaker 5 Mm.

2:18:47 Speaker 4 You feel that the Rebbe wants it," and that was really the truth. My truth at that time was I didn't need Mashiach. I had the Rebbe, and I'm okay with it. I'm having Farbrengens every Shabbos. I'm having Hanakos. I'm having Mugedik in my Mahon. The Rebbe is handing out dollars every Sunday. Brachos are galore. The Kontrasim the Rebbe's giving out all the time. Uh, okay, so I can't bring a Karpin Shlomim. I never had it in the first place to miss it. I didn't know anything about it, so what do I need?

2:19:14 Speaker 5 Right.

2:19:15 Speaker 4 I had, like, a substitute for Mashiach.

2:19:19 Speaker 5 Right.

2:19:19 Speaker 4 And the Rebbe tried his best, like, "Let's not make it that this substitute is gone before you're desperate for Mashiach."

2:19:25 Speaker 5 Right.

2:19:26 Speaker 4 But that substitute is gone. The Begashmius.

2:19:29 Speaker 5 Right.

2:19:30 Speaker 4 Right? And how do we hold on to the razor-edge anticipation of Taf Shin Nun Beis, Nun Alef, and Nun? How do we hold on to that when we're at such a great distance? And while that's a challenge and a question, I think it's the Tzav HaShoah. I think it is the mission of the day and the reason Gimmel Tammuz happened. And it didn't happen immediately. First, there was a withdrawal of Chavzei HaNadar. Then there was the next withdrawal when there was the next Chavzei HaNadar. Then the Rebbe went to Beth Israel, and the Rebbe was there. That was the next withdrawal away from 770. It's like almost likeeser, eser golius nisgalu abiseinu until they got, until the Sanhedrin completely moved away. The Rebbe went in stages, and each time we were so caught up with the loss of our, our Hiskashrus that we didn't realize that true Hiskashrus means that we have become the Rebbe in our own sense, that this is who we are. In other words, the Taachtain mitsad HaTaachtain is rising up to make a dira v'taachtainim, not the Taachtain because he's inspired by the Eliyoin.

2:20:39 Speaker 5 Hmm.

2:20:40 Speaker 4 And I think that is the reason, I can't speak for the Eibishter. I don't know why Gimmel Tammuz happens, but I think as Chassidim, we need to think into what does it mean to me? What do I need to do with it? What do I make of it? My father used to always say, "Vi esm indos mitag, mitag apel tzum mitaleffel." Like, how do you eat Gimmel Tammuz? Do you use a fork or a spoon?

2:20:59 Speaker 5 He said that about Gimmel Tammuz?

2:21:00 Speaker 4 No, no.

2:21:00 Speaker 5 Oh, okay.

2:21:00 Speaker 4 He said it about everything.

2:21:01 Speaker 5 Right.

2:21:02 Speaker 4 Like, whenever you have a problem-

2:21:03 Speaker 5 Right

2:21:03 Speaker 4 ... wrapping your mind around something, he'd say-

2:21:05 Speaker 5 Right

2:21:05 Speaker 4 ..."Vi esm indos mitag apel tzum mitaleffel."

2:21:07 Speaker 5 Right.

2:21:07 Speaker 4 It's a saying in Yiddish.

2:21:09 Speaker 5 Right.

2:21:09 Speaker 4 But a lot of people my age, I know for sure, are confused about what is Gimmel Tammuz. Is it a day of happiness? Because the Rebbe was always pushing Simcha. Every Yutras Kestler was a happy day.

2:21:18 Speaker 5 Right, right.

2:21:19 Speaker 4 Is it a day of Yeshaivos? Is it a day of Hiskashrus? Is it a day of crying? Is it a day of mourning or grief? Right? And I think it's all of that because the grief and the crying and the loss creates the Rechok, and the Rechok is meant to be responded to with the realization that, you know what? I don't... What I'm, what, what... The distance isn't meant to be overcome by returning, but by becoming what we miss.

2:21:45 Speaker 5 Right.

2:21:46 Speaker 4 And if we become the Rebbe today by actually taking ownership of this need to bring Mashiach-

2:21:53 Speaker 5 Right

2:21:53 Speaker 4 ... becomes my responsibility. And the Rebbe said how? Not by losing my stamina because I've been pushing all the time. I'm gonna make it happen. I'm gonna make it. But by realizing it has to be internal, it has to come from within me. I have to really care that so-and-so didn't put on tefillin, and that means I have to give up lunch hour if I want to, if, if, if I could make a difference to him. In other words, that has to become the way the Rebbe would treat that person didn't put on, put on tefillin today is how I need to try to feel that way.

2:22:23 Speaker 5 Hmm.

2:22:23 Speaker 4 I'm not gonna get there overnight. I'm not gonna give up my lunch hour today so that that guy can put on tefillin, but I have to start working that way because I think that that is what we Chassidim are supposed to make of Gimmel Tammuz. So when you say, "What was the message? Like, why did it happen? Was there a break in the plan?" I think the plan always was meant for us, for Malchus to be successful.

2:22:43 Speaker 5 You kind of answered my question from the other podcast.

2:22:45 Speaker 4 Yeah.

2:22:45 Speaker 5 I don't remember what I asked, but okay.

2:22:46 Speaker 4 Well, that was the question. Like, what's the narrative here? Did we lose the plot? And I think the plot always was that Mashiach would come without a Gimmel Tammuz. The Rebbe would say we have to be yotzei the, the, um, yotzei the, what was the lash, the lashon of, um, w-with, with V'nafshika Afa L'chol Tiya were yotzei that-

2:23:08 Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Were, were yotzei v'kitz-

2:23:11 Speaker 4 Hakitzav Ran Hamashiach Ne'afar So the Rebbe's clearly saying, "We wanna bring Moshiach without Agam Tamuz."

2:23:16 Speaker 5 Isn't that in the famous Maamer?

2:23:22 Speaker 4 The famous Maamer. So, and, and the Rebbe said this many times by farbrengen. I remember hearing the Rebbe say it.

2:23:28 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:23:28 Speaker 4 And, and it shook me up because the Rebbe's saying, "We wanna bring Moshiach bef- without me needing to pass away." I mean, the Rebbe's getting older.

2:23:36 Speaker 5 So you, you remember thinking that?

2:23:37 Speaker 4 I remember thinking that. I remember parts-

2:23:39 Speaker 5 But wasn't that, wasn't the Rebbe speaking about the Rebbes then? Or you thought the Rebbe was talking about himself?

2:23:44 Speaker 4 It got... As time passed, after Mem Kes.

2:23:46 Speaker 5 Right. So the Rebbe's talking about-

2:23:48 Speaker 4 Yeah

2:23:48 Speaker 5 ... 70. So you felt that the Rebbe was... Did you, you were thinking about the Rebbe getting older?

2:23:52 Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, not so much as a, on a regular basis. I, I, I was sharing a memory just yesterday when i-in, in Mem He, when the Rebbe was 85, so that was Mem Zayin.

2:24:03 Speaker 5 Right.

2:24:03 Speaker 4 Mem Zayin, the Rebbe was outside after Talluchan. He was, uh... We were singing, and the Rebbe was encouraging the singing. And I remember my seventh-grade teacher said to me, "My goodness, he's 85 years old, and look at his stamina." And I looked at him, "What are you crazy? He's a Rebbe. He's not 85. He's... This isn't an 85-year-old person. This is a Rebbe."

2:24:22 Speaker 5 Right.

2:24:22 Speaker 4 Like, I never registered his age. Like, his age only meant which kapitel I have to say.

2:24:26 Speaker 5 Right.

2:24:27 Speaker 4 He's kapitel peh vav. He's not 85 years old.

2:24:29 Speaker 5 Right.

2:24:30 Speaker 4 As an adult, you think differently. But when the Rebbe said that „Misal, misal sch- ach shpurn the, the, the, uh, „kitzevei ran hashech nefer with anaf sheya hafah la'kaltia," that shook me up. When the Rebbe started talking a lot about „ma hu bachaim avzareh bachaim"

2:24:45 Speaker 5 Right

2:24:46 Speaker 4 ... in, in Taf Shin Beis, and I don't remember which farbrengen. I told you in advance, don't ask me any questions about what the Rebbe said this day or that day. My memory doesn't work that way.

2:24:54 Speaker 5 That's, that's, that's for, that's for a different podcast.

2:24:55 Speaker 4 But I remember feeling so disturbed when the Rebbe said, „Ma hu bachaim avzareh bachaim" for an entire farbrengen.

2:25:00 Speaker 5 Right.

2:25:01 Speaker 4 And then shortly afterwards was Chazai Nadar. And I remember thinking, "What was the Rebbe trying to tell us?" And it-- The whole thing is the Rebbe saying to me now as I look back and I begin to realize, put the pieces together and realize the Rebbe's saying, "Listen, Malchus is supposed to be able to set up the next world to be the way Malchus is."

2:25:23 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:25:23 Speaker 4 "You have to be the next world and not just do the easy route, which is just try to see me through his Kashrus to me and be part of my world. I need you to be yourself."

2:25:36 Speaker 5 Right.

2:25:36 Speaker 4 "And I need you within yourself to be attached to me. I need you to become me, not just to be attached to me."

2:25:43 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:25:44 Speaker 4 And if we could wrap our minds around that as a Kahal Achidim and, and stop having our petty arguments- ... and our insecurity that leads to putting people down and creating segments, and this is the right circle, and that's the wrong circle, and all just become what Malchus could create if Malchus is allowed to do its job properly, and just become transparent to the influence of the Rebbe's Malchus, and all of us become like that. And not because we're Batel, because that is more in Yosher, but more because we're standing on our own feet with the same mission, shoulder to shoulder, everyone together, each one contributing what is unique about their own flavor. Even if it's different from mine, I don't feel offended by that, or I don't feel challenged or questioned by that because that's you and this is me, and I'm okay with that. I think that is the Tzav HaSha. I think that is what we're made to, m- we're meant to make of Gimmel Tamuz.

2:26:45 Speaker 5 Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah, Ma-Malchus, "Ei Malchus bilei Am," and, "Am lo sh'neim emos," right? So the, the, the, the separation of, of, of... The separation, Malchus is different and unique in the sense that on one hand, it, it depends on Richuk, on distance.

2:27:05 Speaker 4 Yeah.

2:27:06 Speaker 5 And at the sa-- A-and therefore, there's idea of Kabbalist Malchus, right? The, the, the Am is, uh, Malchus depends on the Am for it to exist, Ei Ma- Ei Malchus bilei Am. But at the same time, what are they accepting? They're accepting Bitul. They're accepting, they're accepting the king's ownership of them, the king's rulership of them. And I think this goes back to what I, what I, what I pointed out earlier, is that, you know, a lot of times these ideas are quite, are quite elegant if we don't turn them into a, a, a, a, a mush, you know, where, where we, where we don't let the, the, the, the, the question settle before we get to the answer. You're talking about, you know, uh, people getting carried away with silliness or, or, or the, the typical kind of petty fights or whatever. I feel a lot of that has to do with the fact that we don't accept the fact that Malchus means... Yes, it means Kabbalist Malchus and, and Bitul and all kinds of wonderful i- wonderful and powerful ideas. But it means at the core that we have to, uh, we, we, we realize that we're distant. And we're distant to, to, to that. We're distant to one another. And what that means is that we each have our own worlds that we're trying to-

2:28:22 Speaker 4 Hmm

2:28:22 Speaker 5 ... figure out. We have our own worlds that we're trying to figure out. And, you know, to tie it to, to our conversation earlier about Emes, you said, "What is the day of Gimmel Tamuz?" Well, one of the themes of, Ch- that Chassidus explains and, and, and especially in the Chabad Torah, I find this to be a, a very common theme, is that, you know, the Al- the Alter Rebbe speaks about how you find Emes, „Daf v'kashta mishom."

2:28:46 Speaker 4 Yes.

2:28:46 Speaker 5 Right? You find Emes in the-

2:28:47 Speaker 4 Transform the Sham into a shame

2:28:49 Speaker 5 ... you find, you find the Emes in the distance places. That is the, that is the ultimate prayer of Mo- Uh, in this week's Parshah, this past week's Parshah, „Ba'ateich donna," similar idea, where Moshe Rabbeinu's asking the Hamashchiach that there should be a re-- that you should be able to find Godliness even in the place the Jews have fallen after the Cheit Meraglim. Even there, „Neiser avin," that the Hamashchiach should be able to pick up the heaviness of avin, the, the heaviness of being alone, the heaviness of, of despair, of falling into a dark place. Over there, too, is „Dafka" where you can find with, with Teshuva. You can turn, like the author says, you can turn Pesha into Shefa-

2:29:29 Speaker 4 Mm-hmm

2:29:29 Speaker 5 ... which is a beautiful idea, the same letters.

2:29:32 Speaker 4 Yeah.

2:29:32 Speaker 5 You can take... You can, you, you can t- you can transform your distance into, into a, in-in-into a place of closeness. But you have to first accept. You have to be-- You have to accept the reality, not because you agree with me and my shit is on my podcast or whatever. You have to accept the reality that you're distant, that you're, that, that, that dis-- Even if, even if we ex- even if we define it on a more technical level, that you're not in the place you thought you would be 30 years ago.

2:30:00 Speaker 4 Right.

2:30:01 Speaker 5 You know, everyone can agree-

2:30:03 Speaker 4 Never imagined

2:30:03 Speaker 5 ... everyone can agree at that definition. You're gonna say, "Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm going with my thing, that people are distant, and distance, da-da." Okay, fine. W-we won't go into what I believe, and, uh, it's not the point here. The, the here is not my shitas or my ashkaf is, and where I'm right and where I'm wrong. I think everyone can agree that we are in a place today that no one imagined or anticipated or described according to their narratives and according to their theories and their theologies that we'd be here now.

2:30:30 Speaker 4 Their models, their predictions.

2:30:31 Speaker 5 Correct. Correct. So we are distant in that regard. And so the question is, what do you do? And that, and that distance doesn't melt away by saying, "Oh, well, Hishkashrus so that the distance never really..." No, no, that distance is real. That's the whole point. But when you say, what is the day of Gimmel Tammuz, I think based on what you described earlier or explained, explained earlier, Emes is for each person in their own way. If, if, if we all try to be the same, you know, you, you talk about 27 Chaf Ches Nissan, the, the, the, the, the, the, the tape playing and everyone signing a letter. Like, I wasn't there. It's easy for me to be, um, you know, uh, what's the word? A co- you know, uh, what's the word? Countercultural today and to be Mr. Independent when I, when I wa- I probably would've done what everyone else was doing. But look, but looking on that, looking on the way you described it, what was happening, we all have to do the same thing, and why aren't you joining? Why aren't you joining? Uh, that, that's, that's, that's by definition-

2:31:29 Speaker 4 The wrong approach

2:31:30 Speaker 5 ... that's by definition not Emes.

2:31:31 Speaker 4 The wrong direction.

2:31:32 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:31:33 Speaker 4 So I was thinking about this Friday night because I was explaining these concepts, but it was too late to really elaborate, and then I realized, you know, what I was really trying to say is that Hishkashrus is about becoming part of the Nefesh Hachlalos, the Neshamah Klalos. And that means to lose yourself and to refind yourself inside Atzmus Olam, which is the Neshamah Klalos of the Adam HaRishon and of the Mashiah Ben David in each generation. The Nasi, the Nitzotz of Shiloh Ayn K'voino. So you lose yourself, and everybody becomes the same. But the objective of Malchus, which is the objective of Mashiach, is that that Emes should be seen in every color along the kaleidoscope of colors.

2:32:14 Speaker 5 Correct.

2:32:15 Speaker 4 And that's what we need to be able to do. And when you're in a kaleidoscope, I love what you said earlier, when you're distant from the source, you're distant from each other. In the Mitzvas Ahavas Yisroel in Derech Mitzvosacha in the second Perek, the, the, the, um, the Tzemach Tzedek makes that very point. When we're all the Achdus, then we are connected to the Aibishter. And when we are distant from the Aibishter, we become disparate from one another.

2:32:39 Speaker 5 Right.

2:32:39 Speaker 4 Become disparate pieces. And so realizing that is, that it's not a bad thing. In Kisavei, I think it's Chelek Dalet in Likutei Sichos, Rebbe talks about what is true Achdus. And he says Achdus is not when we're all the same, when we're all thinking along the same lines and wanting the same things. Achdus is when everybody is Tachas Gat Nevu Tachat Einasai, and still they're all working towards the same goal, each in their own way.

2:33:04 Speaker 5 Right.

2:33:04 Speaker 4 That's true Achdus, right? Uh, that's the goal here. Each of us has a different color, and that color is so far away from the colorless unity, merging of oneness into Atzmus Olam. It's as far as it could be because it's a color. Not just because it's different from all other colors, 'cause it's a color already there. You're, you're, you're as far as you could be. But the intention is to be far. And we used to say the space between us connects us, doesn't divide us. That implies that the connection should happen when we can traverse that distance and come together. Malchus is about finding our connection at a distance, and that, according to the Rebbe, is the highest connection.

2:33:47 Speaker 5 Right.

2:33:48 Speaker 4 That's where you transcend the spatial limitations, and you're able to find oneness from the state of Etzem. Like the Rebbe told Shalom Ber Livsker and his wife, I'm gonna be sitting here. You're gonna be in Florida, but I'm with you.

2:34:06 Speaker 5 Right.

2:34:07 Speaker 4 I'm with you. Not because I'm physically with you, but s- I'm more with you there than I am if, than you, than I am when you're sitting with me. So, like, I, I, I give this Mashal. I used it last night. I think you were there when I used the Mashal of the, the woman who asks her husband if he can go out in a rainstorm and get a bagel.

2:34:25 Speaker 5 Right.

2:34:25 Speaker 4 And he says, "No, I love you too much. I wanna... I can't stand to be apart from you. I'd rather stay with you."

2:34:29 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:34:30 Speaker 4 He's physically close, but he's emotionally distant.

2:34:32 Speaker 5 Right.

2:34:33 Speaker 4 By chance, if he goes away from her to the bagel shop in the storm, then he's physically distant, but he is so close. Only in the distance do we find our true essence of who we really are, and I think that is the mi- the message of the Maamar of Atzmus Olam. It's really the, the mission for post Gimmel Tammuz, the last Maamar the Rebbe gave us. It is the Chaf Ches Nissan that stirred up Lubavitch. It's the same message that I am stepping back, and I'm handing it to you. It didn't mean the Rebbe was walking away. He said, "Taf Shin Yud Alef, I'm going to support you, but you have to step up. You have to become yourself and not just be me." Sorry, I don't... I, I kept saying you have to become the Rebbe, but not just become a version of me. Not just stop being who you are and try to make yourself a copy of me. Be who you are and show me come through in you. Parashat Vayeshev and Vayigash when the Rebbe talked about how every Shliach has to go to their Makom HaShlichus, use the idioms and the cultures and the habits of that place and bring out the Nitzotz of Elokus through their particular culture and their particular direction. So that Mashiach is gonna look different in France than it does in Italy than it does in Australia. There, it's going to be knicker through the, the barbie, and in France, it's gonna be in

2:35:50 Speaker 4 the wine, and in Italy, it's gonna be in the pastas and the sauces, but it's gonna be the same Mashiach in each place. But only if you stop all trying to be Crown Heights.

2:35:58 Speaker 5 One second. Barbie, you me- you meant barbecue, not-

2:36:00 Speaker 4 Barbecue, yeah

2:36:00 Speaker 5 ... not the Barbie doll.

2:36:02 Speaker 4 Not the Barbie doll. The barbecue. They call her Barbie.

2:36:03 Speaker 5 Yeah. I know.

2:36:05 Speaker 4 'Cause you went to Australia.

2:36:06 Speaker 5 I did.

2:36:06 Speaker 4 You said that. So- The Rebbe's saying, uh, Mashiach is a kaleidoscope of the same essence, but reflected in every single color on the spectrum. The entire kaleidoscope is all different colors, and it's the same essence.

2:36:19 Speaker 5 Yeah.

2:36:19 Speaker 4 That's where we get to the true essence. Not when we have to be attached in order to feel connected, but when we can step away, be at this place where we feel desperate, homesick for Lubavitch, right?

2:36:32 Speaker 5 To, to, to-

2:36:32 Speaker 4 We feel homesick for those days. And, and it doesn't... Instead of it being a negative, we transform it, like you said, peshat to sufa. We transform it into right here from within this place, ""Tzamah lecha nafshi. Halevai bakoidesh chazisicha."" I see you bakoidesh, in this place of the midbar.

2:36:51 Speaker 5 Yeah. To, to, to wrap it up with a bow, to put it in the language that we start off with about narratives, is to take the Meitzar HaGaran, to take the Straits of Hormuz, and to, you know, to open them up, ""Krasus teshiv"" that you go from a place of, of, of, um, you know, meisar el merchav. Uh, in many ways, this is what Chassidus tells us, that Mashiach is the ability to go out of a world where everybody is following the same narrow copying and pasting from somebody else, uh, holy as it may be, and, and realizing that you are where you are for a reason, and that part, that part matters, too, and you have to find the emes of that part. You can't... Not, not Like, what, what you've... What's easy for you is not therefore the emes. It's usually the opposite. But the fact that it's hard for you is part of the emes. The hester is part of the emes as well, like we learned in Shaarei Yichud V'Emunah in the past few days. And, and that is, and that, that is the... It, it's not an easy message, but it is an empowering message. That's, that's the second side. How do you know something is true? It's demanding, but it's empowering.

2:38:01 Speaker 4 Yeah.

2:38:01 Speaker 5 Right? If it, if it, if it just, if it's just demanding and knocks you to the floor, it's probably not emes either. It has to have both.

2:38:07 Speaker 4 The distance doesn't disempower you.

2:38:09 Speaker 5 Right.

2:38:09 Speaker 4 The distance enables you to find the Rebbe inside your, your distant self. I love the copy and paste. Stop copying the Rebbe and paste it on yourself. Be yourself and show how that, too, is Rebbe.

2:38:23 Speaker 5 All right. This has been quite a, quite a conversation. Thank you very much.

2:38:26 Speaker 4 Thank you for having me.

2:38:26 Speaker 5 I think it's a good place to, a good place to leave it off. Enough to... More than enough to think about, and, uh, thank you very much.

2:38:33 Speaker 4 Let's hope by the time it plays, it'll be already after

2:38:35 Speaker 5 Beis HaKeles Etzik. Amen. Amen.